A Microwatt Dual-Mode Electrochemical Sensing Current Readout With Current-Reducer Ramp Waveform Generation

—An electrochemical sensing chip with an integrated current-reducer pattern generator and a current-mirror based low-noise chopper-stabilization potentiostat circuit is presented. The pattern generator, utilizing the current reducer technique and pseudo resistors, creates a sub-Hz ramp signal for the cyclic voltammetric (CV) measurement without large-size passive components. The proposed design adopts the chopper-stabilization and low-noise biasing technique for the potentiostat and a counter-based time-to-digital converter to reduce the amplitude noise effects and to convert the sensing current signal to digital codes for further data processing. The design is fabricated using a 0.18-µm CMOS process and achieves a 41 pA current resolution in the current range of ±5 µA while maintaining the R² linearity of 0.998. The system consumes 16 µW from a 1.2 V supply when a 5 µA sensing current is detected. The power efficiency of the readout interface is 0.31, and the sensing current dynamic range is 108 dB. The design is fully integrated into a single chip and is successfully tested in the dual-mode (CA/CV) measurements with commercial gold electrodes in a potassium ferricyanide solution in sub-millimolar concentrations.