A large range and fine tuning configurable Bandgap reference dedicated to wafer-scale systems

A compact configurable voltage reference in a 180 nm CMOS technology dedicated to a wafer-scale prototyping platform for electronic systems is described. The proposed topology is based on a PTAT current generator mixed with CTAT nMOS diode connected transistors to achieve temperature and power supply independency. This new Bandgap reference (BGR) uses a configurable unbalanced differential pair to achieve an output voltage that ranges from 1.33 to 3.04 V. This large voltage range can be fine tuned with a ~10 mV step for a total of 246 unique output values. Existing configurable BGRs either have a fine grain tuning over a very small range of outputs or a wide range of outputs with coarse tuning. The temperature dependency is less than 27 mV over 60°C with a power supply sensitivity of 17.8 mV/V. The proposed design achieves the best Figure Of Merit and is compared with other similar available implementations for a configurable BGR.