Dr. Zia Abbas and his students V Pullela, A Ali and A Jain presented a paper on A 156pW Gate-Leakage Based Voltage/Current Reference for Low-Power IoT Systems at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), Austin, Texas from 28 May to 1 June. A Ali is currently working at Texas Instruments and A Jain is currently working at T Microelectronics after completing their MS/DD course. The other author of this paper is Prof. Inhee Lee from University of Pittsburgh, USA.
Research work as described by the authors: The paper presents a sub-nW gate-leakage based voltage and current reference in a single circuit whose reference values are scalable and don’t incorporate start-up circuits or resistors in the architecture. The power consumption of the proposed circuit increases by only 2.1x in the temperature range of -55oC to 100oC, unlike conventional voltage/current references where the power consumption increases exponentially w.r.t temperature. Implemented in 90nm technology, the proposed voltage reference (current reference) achieves post-trim typical accuracy of 22ppm/oC (58 ppm/oC) and worst-case accuracy of 71ppm/oC (78 ppm/oC). Excellent line sensitivities of 0.029%/V and 0.059%/V are observed for voltage and current reference respectively, in a supply range of 1V – 3V. Without any start-up circuit, the observed 99% settling times for voltage and current reference are 1.92ms and 2.526ms respectively. The area occupied by the total circuit is 0.0015mm2 , while the power consumption is 156pW at the typical corner, room temperature, and 1V supply.
The IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) is the flagship conference of the IEEE Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society and the world’s premier networking forum for researchers in the highly active fields of theory, design, and implementation of circuits and systems.
Conference page: https://www.iscas2022.org/