Low Voltage, Low Power, Compact, High Accuracy, High Precision PTAT Temperature Sensor for Deep Sub-micron CMOS Systems

Abstract

Temperature measurement is becoming increasingly important in integrated circuits and microsystems; nevertheless, existing techniques for the integration of high accuracy, high precision temperature sensors are not optimal for deep submicron CMOS processes. Here we describe a low voltage, low power, compact, high accuracy, high precision temperature sensor for deep sub-micron CMOS systems; our approach takes advantage of charge balancing and charge sharing for low current consumption, does not use resistors for compactness, and takes advantage of both PTAT and autozero techniques for high accuracy and high precision; the circuit can be operated at low supply voltages. As a proof of concept, we report transistor level simulations in a standard 0.13µm process; the sensor only sinks about 6 from a 1.2V supply voltage, achieving a power dissipation as low as 7.2 W.

Twin‐Wire Sensor Networks

“…The biasing current error ΔI and the voltage gain error ΔA may typically not be ignored and can degrade the measurement accuracy. For instance, in integrated circuits, it is generally possible to design bandgap voltage references [19][20][21][22][23][24][25] which, even in processes that do not allow the integration of good quality resistors, [26,27] can be reasonably accurate (curvature correction [20,21,[23][24][25]28] may be required for improved accuracy). By contrast, it is generally complex to design accurate current references because of the typically large tolerance of integrated resistors, thus resulting in significant ΔI errors.…”