Reducing the Bipolar Junction Transistor Vbe Non-Linearity

Abstract

There is an increasing demand for high-performance, low-cost, small footprint and reliable silicon-based temperature sensors. Most of the high precision temperature sensors are based on Bipolar Junction Transistor (BJT). The baseemitter voltage of a BJT can be a good temperature sensor if the device to device distribution is compensated and its inherent nonlinearity is reduced. This paper proposes simple, low cost, high precision, low noise, temperature sensor. The base-emitter voltage variation and its non-linearity will be discussed, and the corresponding trimming will be presented.