摘要

This paper presents an area-efficient time-domain CMOS smart temperature sensor using a curvature compensation oscillator for linearity enhancement with a -40 to 120 degrees C temperature range operability. The inverter-based smart temperature sensors can substantially reduce the cost and circuit complexity of integrated temperature sensors. However, a large curvature exists on the temperature-to-time transfer curve of the inverter-based delay line and results in poor linearity of the sensor output. For cost reduction and error improvement, a temperature-to-pulse generator composed of a ring oscillator and a time amplifier was used to generate a thermal sensing pulse with a sufficient width proportional to the absolute temperature (PTAT). Then, a simple but effective on-chip curvature compensation oscillator is proposed to simultaneously count and compensate the PTAT pulse with curvature for linearization. With such a simple structure, the proposed sensor possesses an extremely small area of 0.07 mm(2) in a TSMC 0.35-m CMOS 2P4M digital process. By using an oscillator-based scheme design, the proposed sensor achieves a fine resolution of 0.045 degrees C without significantly increasing the circuit area. With the curvature compensation, the inaccuracy of -1.2 to 0.2 degrees C is achieved in an operation range of -40 to 120 degrees C after two-point calibration for 14 packaged chips. The power consumption is measured as 23 W at a sample rate of 10 samples/s.

  • 出版日期2013-9

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