A CMOS piecewise curvature-compensated voltage reference

Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach to the design of a high-precision CMOS voltage reference. The proposed circuit utilizes MOS transistors instead of bipolar transistors to generate positive and negative temperature coefficient (TC) currents summed up to a resistive load to generate low TC reference voltage. A piecewise curvature-compensation technique is also used to reduce the TC of the reference voltage within a wider temperature range. The output reference voltage can be adjusted in a wide range according to different system requirements by setting different parameters such as resistors and transistor aspect ratios. The proposed circuit is designed for TSMC 0.6μm standard CMOS process. Spectre-based simulations demonstrate that the TC of the reference voltage is 4.3ppm/°C with compensation compared with 107ppm/°C without compensation in the temperature ranges from −15 to 95°C using a 1.5V supply voltage. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]