A Nanoscale Low-Power Resistorless Voltage Reference with High PSRR

Abstract

In this paper, a nano-watt resistorless subthreshold voltage reference with high-power supply rejection ratio (PSRR) is presented. A self-biased MOS voltage divider is proposed to provide bias current for whole voltage reference, which is a positive temperature coefficient (TC) current containing threshold voltage characteristics. By injecting the generated current into a transistor with a different threshold voltage, a delta threshold voltage with a greatly reduced negative TC is realized and temperature-compensated by a generated positive TC item at the same time. Therefore, a temperature-stable voltage reference is achieved in the proposed compacted method with low power consumption and high PSRR. Verification results with 65-nm CMOS technology demonstrate that the minimum supply voltage can be as low as 0.35 V with a 0.00182-mm2 active area. The generated reference voltage is 148 mV, with a TC of 28 ppm/°C for the − 30 to 80 °C temperature range. The line sensitivity is 1.8 mV/V, and the PSRR without any filtering capacitor at 100 Hz is 53 dB with a 2.28-nW power consumption.

A Transient-Enhanced Voltage Regulator with Stability and Power-Supply-Rejection Boosting

“…The current bias circuit provides biasing current for the whole regulator system [12, 14]. The reference voltage can be generated in many different ways [1], and the detailed circuit is not shown here. An embedded current limiting loop functions as an OCP circuit to limit the load current to a preset value.…”

“…In modern nanometer-scale system on chip (SoC) designs, different sub-blocks usually require different supply rails to achieve some specific functions. Besides, the whole SoC system may need to operate under a wide range of input voltage and still provide high performance unaffected by the supply conditions changing [1]. Thus, wide input voltage range voltage regulator (VR) implemented in nanometer-scale technology can be one of the most suitable candidates for this kind of applications.…”