A 8.83 ppm/°C temperature coefficient, 75 dB PSRR subthreshold CMOS voltage reference with piecewise curvature compensation

Abstract

A subthreshold CMOS voltage reference (CVR) with low temperature coefficient (TC) over a wide temperature range and low power is proposed in this paper. The proposed CVR utilizes the $\Delta V_{GS}$ of different-threshold and same-threshold nMOS pairs to generate complementary-to-absolute-temperature (CTAT) and proportional-to-absolute-temperature (PTAT) voltages, respectively. To compensate for the low-temperature and high-temperature segments of the temperature characteristic curve, the nonlinear compensation currents generated by the exponential-like relationship between the drain current and the gate-source voltage of two MOSFETs work in the subthreshold region is used. Based on a 0.18-μm CMOS process, post-layout simulation results show that the proposed CVR achieves an average output voltage of 263 mV. The power supply ripple rejection (PSRR) is −75 dB at 10 Hz and the line sensitivity (LS) is 0.0069 %/V when the supply voltage varies from 0.8 V to 2.5 V. The average TC is 8.83 ppm/°C for a wide temperature range of −40 °C–120 °C, and the minimum TC is only 3.65 ppm/°C.