Surge protection design with surge-to-digital converter for microelectronic circuits and systems

A surge protection design with surge-to-digital converter is proposed to provide the surge protection for microelectronic products with more flexible applications. The proposed surge-to-digital converter can transfer the occurrences of the surge events into digital output codes by classifying the voltage levels of surge events. It can be used to avoid unwanted power-on reset action, redundant power consumption, or unexpected soft errors, achieving the stability improvement of microelectronic systems. With this surge-to-digital converter, a surge protection design against a surge test of 25 V can clamp the peak voltage of V_DD from 22.2 V to 5.6 V. The proposed converter has been verified in a 0.18-μm CMOS process.