A 65nm CMOS low power delay line based temperature sensor

Abstract

In this paper, a fully digital delay line based temperature sensor is presented for on-chip thermal monitoring. Unlike previous delay line temperature sensors, the proposed design employs a 2N to N tab decoding along with counter and in this way dynamic power is saved by a factor of 2N. Post-layout simulation for a 65nm CMOS design shows that the proposed sensor consumes 0.02 nJ energy per conversion and it has a resolution of 1.0 °C with errors less than ±3.0 °C over a temperature range from 0 to 100 °C.