A 8pW Noise Interference-Free Dual-Output Voltage Reference for Implantable Medical Devices

Abstract

This paper presents a novel pico-watt dual-output voltage reference for implantable medical devices (IMDs). In IMDs, excellent capabilities to reject the noise from power source and work with low power consumption and small active area are critical for voltage references. In the proposed design, a dual-output reference voltage is generated through two sets of 2-transistor (2-T) structure and a shared 4-bit trimming circuit to reduce the effects of process variations. At a typical corner, the proposed circuit generates two reference voltages Vref1 and Vref2 of about 88mV and 228mV and the voltage difference is 0.756mV and 6.546mV respectively from 0 °C to 120 °C, The noise rejection ratio greater than 35dB achieved in the simulation shows that Vref2 has a strong ability to suppress the noise of Vref1. Therefore, two noise-isolated reference voltages are generated, providing accurate and interference-free reference voltages for noisy and noiseless functional circuits. Furthermore, the power consumption is only 8.52 pW at room temperature and the active area is only 0.0019 mm2.