1.5 ppm/°C nano-Watt resistorless MOS-only voltage reference

Abstract

This paper presents a MOS-only high power supply rejection (PSRR) voltage reference with a very low temperature coefficient (TC) that consumes only tens of nano-Watt. It is composed by a threshold voltage monitor circuit with no resistors, cascaded with a thermal voltage generator, adequate for fabrication in standard processes. Since the MOS transistors operate in subthreshold and near-threshold regimes the current consumption is very low. The operation of the circuit is analytically described and a design methodology is proposed. Post-layout simulations for a design in a 130 nm CMOS process are presented, resulting a reference voltage around 670 mV with a best case TC of 1.5 ppm/°C for the -40 to +125 °C range and an average TC of 20 ppm/°C over process variations, untrimmed. A very low sensitivity to VDD is achieved, resulting a PSRR lower than -71 dB at 100 Hz and a line sensitivity (LS) lower than 576 ppm/V for a supply range from 1 to 3 V. The area is very small, 0.0084 mm2 including the start-up stage.