An accurate, trimless, high PSRR, low-voltage, CMOS bandgap reference IC

Bandgap reference circuits are used in a host of analog, digital, and mixed-signal systems to establish an accurate voltage standard for the entire IC. The accuracy of the bandgap reference voltage under steady-state (dc) and transient (ac) conditions is critical to obtain high system performance. In this work, the impact of process, power-supply, load, and temperature variations and package stresses on the dc and ac accuracy of bandgap reference circuits has been analyzed. Based on this analysis, the a bandgap reference that 1. has high dc accuracy despite process and temperature variations and package stresses, without resorting to expensive trimming or noisy switching schemes, 2. has high dc and ac accuracy despite power-supply variations, without using large off-chip capacitors that increase bill-of-material costs, 3. has high dc and ac accuracy despite load variations, without resorting to error-inducing buffers, 4. is capable of producing a sub-bandgap reference voltage with a low power-supply, to enable it to operate in modern, battery-operated portable applications, 5. utilizes a standard CMOS process, to lower manufacturing costs, and 6. is integrated, to consume less board space has been proposed. The functionality of critical components of the system has been verified through prototypes after which the performance of the complete system has been evaluated by integrating all the individual components on an IC. The proposed CMOS bandgap reference can withstand 5mA of load variations while generating a reference voltage of 890mV that is accurate with respect to temperature to the first order. It exhibits a trimless, dc 3-sigma accuracy performance of 0.84% over a temperature range of -40°C to 125°C and has a worst case ac power-supply ripple rejection (PSRR) performance of 30dB up to 50MHz using 60pF of on-chip capacitance. All the proposed techniques lead to the development of a CMOS bandgap reference that meets the low-cost, high-accuracy demands of state-of-the-art System-on-Chip environments.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Rincon-Mora, Gabriel; Committee Member: Ayazi, Farrokh; Committee Member: Bhatti, Pamela; Committee Member: Leach, W. Marshall; Committee Member: Morley, Thoma

A simple bandgap reference based on VGO extraction with single-temperature trimming

Bandgap references are widely used in analog and mixed-signal systems to provide temperature-independent voltage or current reference. In traditional bandgap structure, the base-emitter voltage VBE of a diode is used to generate a complementary to absolute temperature (CTAT) voltage, which reduces as temperature increases. The base-emitter voltage difference ∆VBE between two diodes with the same current but different emitter areas supplies a proportional to absolute temperature (PTAT) voltage. With the proper adjustment of the coefficients of VBE and ∆VBE in a voltage summer, the temperature dependency of the summed voltage can be mostly canceled out and the output voltage can achieve a relative temperature-constant property. However, even though the linear terms of temperature-dependent components in PTAT and CTAT expressions can be canceled out, there are still some high order terms left, which still affect temperature dependency. For this reason, a first-order bandgap reference with only PTAT and CTAT linear term compensation cannot achieve a sufficiently low temperature coefficient (TC), normally ranging from 10ppm/°C to over 100ppm/°C. To achieve higher precision and lower TC, the high order terms also need to be considered and compensated by some techniques. This thesis study describes the development of a high order bandgap structure, including the initial thinking, design flow, equation derivation, circuit implementation, and simulation result

A 261mV bandgap reference based on beta multiplier with 64ppm

In this paper, a low voltage bandgap reference circuit has been proposed. The introduction of a modified beta multiplier bias circuit decreased the mismatch caused by the PMOS transistors opamp contribution. By shifting the fixed resistors to the NMOSs drain side, the beta multiplier bias was able to minimise threshold mismatch between the two NMOS transistors. A 200-point MC simulation showed 0.9mV standard deviation, with a 0.34% accuracy. The simulated temperature coefficient was 64ppm/0C. The proposed circuit consumed 5.04µW of power from a 0.45V power supply voltage. A prototype was implemented in 65nm CMOS technology occupying a 2888µm2 silicon area, with the nominal value of the reference at 261mV

A 0.6V MOS-only voltage reference for bio-medical applications with 40ppm/0c temperature drift

This paper exploits the CMOS beta multiplier circuit to synthesize a temperature independent voltage reference suitable for low voltage and ultra-low power bio-medical applications. The technique presented here uses only MOS transistors to generate PTAT and CTAT currents. A selfbiasing technique has been used to minimize the temperature and power supply dependency. A prototype in 65nm CMOS has been developed and occupies 0.0039mm, and at room temperature it generates a 204mV reference voltage with 1.3mV drift over a wide temperature range (from -40 to 1250C). This has been designed to operate with a power supply voltage down to 0.6V and consumes 1.8uA current from the supply. The simulated temperature coefficient is 40ppm/0C

Low power CMOS IC, biosensor and wireless power transfer techniques for wireless sensor network application

The emerging field of wireless sensor network (WSN) is receiving great attention due to the interest in healthcare. Traditional battery-powered devices suffer from large size, weight and secondary replacement surgery after the battery life-time which is often not desired, especially for an implantable application. Thus an energy harvesting method needs to be investigated. In addition to energy harvesting, the sensor network needs to be low power to extend the wireless power transfer distance and meet the regulation on RF power exposed to human tissue (specific absorption ratio). Also, miniature sensor integration is another challenge since most of the commercial sensors have rigid form or have a bulky size. The objective of this thesis is to provide solutions to the aforementioned challenges

A Microwatt low voltage bandgap reference for bio-medical applications

In this paper a microwatt low voltage bandgap reference suitable for the bio-medical application. The Present technique relies on the principle of generating CTAT and PTAT without using any (Bipolar Junction Transistor) BJT and adding them with a proper scaling factor for minimal temperature sensitive reference voltage. Beta multiplier reference circuit has been explored to generate CTAT and PTAT. Implemented in 45nm CMOS technology and simulated with Spectre. Simulation results shows that the proposed reference circuit exhibits 1.2% variation at nominal 745mV output voltage. The circuit consumes 16uW from 0.8V supply and occupying 0.004875mm2 silicon area

A 0.82V supply and 23.4 ppm/0C current mirror assisted bandgap reference

Traditional BGR circuits require a 1.05V supply due to the VBE of the BJT. Deep submicron CMOS technologies are limiting the supply voltage to less than 940mV. Hence there is a strong motivation to design them at lower supply voltages. The supply voltage limitation in conventional BGR is described qualitatively in this paper. Further, a current mirror-assisted technique has been proposed to enable BGR operational at 0.82V supply. A prototype was developed in 65nm TSMC CMOS technology and post-layout simulation results were performed. A self-bias opamp has been exploited to minimize the systematic offset. Proposed BGR targeted at 450mV works from 0.82-1.05V supply without having any degradation in the performance while keeping the integrated noise of 15.2µV and accuracy of 23.4ppm/0C. Further, the circuit consumes 21µW of power and occupies 73*32µm2 silicon area