An All-CMOS Supply, Temperature and Process Invariant Hybrid Current Reference For Power Efficient IoT Applications

Abstract

We propose an all-CMOS, supply independent, second-order temperature compensated, process invariant, 10.09 μA current reference circuit working on a 1.8 V power supply. The current reference is built using an adaptive regulated cascode configuration integrated with a Widlar current source. It is implemented in 180 nm UMC MPW RF process and consumes an area of 0.014 mm2. It has a very low line sensitivity of 0.52 %/V and a temperature coefficient of 9.94 ppm/°C over the automotive temperature range of −40°C to 125°C. The proposed current reference is used to build a high quality, power efficient stable ring oscillator circuit working at 377.9 MHz frequency to be used in IoT SoCs. The ring oscillator shows a variation of less than 1.1 % in frequency, with supply voltage over the range 1.5 V to 2 V. The invariance of frequency with supply voltage can be exploited to reduce the power consumption up to 36.93 % in the oscillator circuit.