A simple picowatt 7.6 ppm/°C, 0.029 %/V line sensitivity fully-CMOS voltage reference with DIBL cancelation

Abstract

In this paper, a 4-transistor sub-one-volt voltage reference with picowatt power consumption is presented. To achieve ultra-low power consumption and low-voltage operation, all transistors are designed to operate in subthreshold region. By proper design of the circuit, DIBL effect is also compensated to enhance temperature coefficient of the circuit and line sensitivity. The proposed circuit consists of only four different transistors (i.e. thick oxide, native V_TH, medium V_TH) in a self-biased scheme such that eliminates the need for any start-up circuit. A prototype of the proposed circuit that generates a 341-mV voltage reference is designed and simulated in a standard 0.18-µm CMOS technology. The proposed reference circuit exhibits an average temperature coefficient of 7.6 ppm/°C across all process corners while the total power consumption is as low as 249 picowatt. The average line sensitivity of the circuit is 0.029 %/V within a wide supply range of 0.6 to 3.3 V. Ultra-low power consumption and line sensitivity, and excellent thermal stability render it ideal for integration into RFID and IoT applications.