An Ultra Low Voltage Low Power Self Biased Latched Comparator with Wide Input Common Mode Range for Biomedical Applications

Abstract

This work describes an ultra low voltage, low power and self biased comparator with wide input common-mode range. The proposed comparator consists of a preamplifier followed by a regenerative back-to-back inverter latch, where two push pull NMOS and PMOS pairs are exploited to bias the preamplifier and adjust its output common mode voltage. This leads to a wide input common mode voltage range (from 0 V to 390 mV). Furthermore, the operation of proposed structure is relatively insensitive to process and temperature variations due to the push pull transistors, and low power consumption is achieved through sub-threshold region operation. The comparator circuit is designed using 65-nm CMOS technology with minimum supply voltage of 0.4 V. Simulation results show an average power consumption ranging from 141 nW to 188 nW for different input common mode voltage levels, where a simple power gating technique is employed to further reduce the power consumption. The Monte Carlo simulation shows an average offset of 450 μV with standard deviation of 3.3 mV. In addition, the comparator shows a kickback noise range of 0.3–2.4 mV (with input common mode range from 0 V to 390 mV) and input referred noise of 0.9 mV. The proposed comparator operates up to clock frequency of 1 MHz in most process corners and temperature range of 0–100°C which is suitable for most of the biomedical sensing applications.

A 0.15-to-0.5 V Body-Driven Dynamic Comparator with Rail-to-Rail ICMR

“…The comparator resolution is determined both by its sensitivity, i.e., the minimum voltage difference that can be detected, and by the offset. A further important feature in many applications is the input common-mode range (ICMR): some ADC architectures (e.g., exploiting single-ended signals [35,36], or SAR ADCs based on the set-and-down algorithm [37]) require a rail-to-rail ICMR to allow a comparison of signal levels across the whole input range [36,[38][39][40].…”