A wavelet Electrocardiogram (ECG) detector for low-power implantable cardiac pacemakers is presented in this paper. The proposed wavelet-based ECG detector consists of a wavelet decomposer with wavelet filter banks, a QRS complex detector of hypothesis testing with wavelet-demodulated ECG signals, and a noise detector with zero-crossing points. In order to achieve high detection accuracy with low power consumption, a multi-scaled product algorithm and soft-threshold algorithm are efficiently exploited in our ECG detector implementation. Our algorithmic and architectural level approaches have been implemented and fabricated in a standard 0.35 μm CMOS technology. The testchip including a low-power analog-to-digital converter (ADC) shows a low detection error-rate of 0.196% and low power consumption of 19.02 μW with a 3 V supply voltage.