Patent ID: 7474132

Claim:
A device comprising: a current sensor having a first connection (sen) node at which a leakage current is sensed and a second connection node at which a compensation enable signal is generated to initiate a compensation of the leakage current via a keeper system, wherein the current sensor includes: a plurality of transistors, including a first PFET M 7 , a second PFET M 8 and a third PFET M 9 , a first NFET M 10 , and a second NFET M 11 , wherein the plurality of transistors are interconnected as follows: respective source terminals of the first PFET M 7 , second PFET M 8 and third PFET M 9 are coupled to a common high voltage node; respective gate terminals of the first PFET M 7 and second PFET M 8 are connected to each other at a common gate node, which gate node is also coupled to a drain terminal of the first PFET M 7 ; a drain terminal of the first PFET M 7 is connected to the internal storage/memory node; a gate terminal of the second PFET M 8 is connected at a sense node to a source terminal of the second NFET M 11 and to the gate terminals of the third PFET M 9 424 and first NFET M 10 ; the third PFET M 9 is coupled at its drain terminal to the source terminal of the first NFET M 10 ; and the drain terminal of the first NFET M 10 is coupled to a common ground node with the drain terminal of the second NFET M 11 , whose gate is coupled to the high voltage node; and a sen node and a cntrl node, wherein the sen node is the first connection node and the cntrl node is the second connection node, which enable coupling of the current sensor to a dummy cell and the online keeper, respectively; a load circuit that emits a load leakage current on an wired output path; an online keeper coupled to an internal storage/memory leakage node on the wired output path and which has a control input point that is coupled to the second connection node of the current sensor to receive the compensation enable signal; and a dummy circuit configured similarly to the load circuit and which generates a substantially exact amount of leakage current as the load circuit, wherein an output of the dummy circuit is coupled to the first connector of the current sensor, which enables the current sensor to sense the amount of leakage current within the dummy circuit and adjust a magnitude of the compensation enable signal generated at the control input of the online keeper wherein the current sensor amplifies the sensed leakage current to generate the compensation enable signal, a magnitude of which activates a specific amount of compensation current required for compensating the sensed amount of leakage current; wherein the online keeper generates the compensation current based on the magnitude of the compensation enable signal; wherein the compensation current generated provides a dynamic online (real-time) compensation of the load leakage current.