A 40V Robust Leakage Current based Start-Up Circuit

In this paper we present a new startup circuit designed and implemented to achieve optimized current consumption features over a wide supply voltage range. This makes the architecture suitable for high voltage industrial and automotive applications. The circuital solution exploits leakage current of a MOS transistor in off state. The validation of the architecture has been performed by demonstrating the unicity of the stability point and the effectiveness in reaching it. The robustness of the proposed solution is ensured by the balancing of leakage currents of devices of the same type. The proposed circuit is implemented in BCD 110 nm technology node, and it is based on 40V DMOS transistors.