A 30.1μm2, < ±1.1°C-3σ-error, 0.4-to-1.0V temperature sensor based on direct threshold-voltage sensing for on-chip dense thermal monitoring

This paper presents on-chip temperature sensor circuits for dense thermal monitoring in digital VLSI systems. The sensor directly captures the temperature dependency of threshold voltage. The prototype in a 65nm demonstrates that as compared to the state of the arts it can achieve a 9× smaller footprint of 30.1μm² and a 3× smaller 3σ-error of <±1.1°C after one temperature point calibration. The proposed sensor also achieves a 0.2V better voltage scalability than the previous best voltage-scalable design.