A Silicon-Germanium Low Power Continuous-Time Voltage Comparator For Wide Temperature Range Applications

This thesis presents the entire integrated circuit creation flow from specification to test for a general purpose low power continuous-time voltage comparator. This comparator was designed to operate over the extreme wide temperature range of -180 °C to 125 °C while staying under 100 microA of steady state power consumption. The comparator was fabricated in IBM's Silicon-Germanium (SiGe) 5AM BiCMOS process as part of a larger research effort to develop integrated electronics for extreme environments. The measured data from the comparator shows that all the major design goals including a power dissipation of less than 300muW and propagation delays that were under 100 ns were achieved.