Novel Thermal Shutdown Circuit for Automotive Power Management Application:

Abstract

This paper presents a thermal-shutdown circuit that has been designed in a $\boldsymbol{2.6\mu m \ BiCMOS}$ process for automotive applications. The robustness of the proposed thermal shutdown circuit stands in its simple structure, that is based on temperature dependent currents comparison. With the proposed implementation, an excellent temperature sensitivity is achieved, while having low quiescent current, of only $\boldsymbol{2.5\mu A}$ and reduced area of 0.048mm2• Moreover, the proposed solution shows a 50% smaller variation of temperature threshold with respect to the standard approach that compares PTAT and constant currents.