Near-/Sub-Vth process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) sensors with dynamic voltage selection

Author

Ming-Hung Chang ; Shang-Yuan Lin ; Pei-Chen Wu ; Zakoretska, Olesya ; Ching-Te Chuang ; Kuan-Neng Chen ; Chen-Chao Wang ; Kua-Hua Chen ; Chi-Tsung Chiu ; Ho-Ming Tong ; Wei Hwang

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electron. Eng., Nat. Chiao Tung Univ., Hsinchu, Taiwan

fYear

2013

fDate

19-23 May 2013

Firstpage

133

Lastpage

136

Abstract

A process, voltage and temperature (PVT) sensors with dynamic voltage selection are proposed for environmental management in the ultra-low voltage dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) system. The process and voltage (PV) sensors initially monitor the process variation. With known process information, PV sensors can real-time provide voltage variation status. The temperature sensor has six temperature sensitive ring oscillators (TSROs) generating frequency proportional to temperature. It dynamically selects the proper TSRO to convert the frequency into digital readings according to voltage status provided by PV sensors. With known process and voltage information from PV sensors, a pure temperature measurement result can be obtained. The proposed PVT sensors are designed in TSMC 65nm CMOS technology. This work can be dynamically operated over an ultra-low voltage range from 0.25V to 0.5V. Only 2.3μW is consumed at 0.25V. They can achieve 0.15 C resolution and 50k samples/sec conversion rate.

Keywords

CMOS integrated circuits; oscillators; temperature sensors; voltage measurement; PVT sensors; TSMC CMOS technology; TSRO; digital readings; environmental management; power 0.23 mW; process voltage and temperature sensors; size 65 nm; temperature sensitive ring oscillators; ultralow voltage DVFS system; ultralow voltage dynamic voltage and frequency scaling system; voltage 0.25 V to 0.5 V; CMOS integrated circuits; Registers; Temperature measurement; Temperature sensors; Threshold voltage; Voltage measurement; Process; near-threshold circuit; sub-threshold circuit; temperature (PVT) variations; temperature sensor; voltage;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), 2013 IEEE International Symposium on

Conference_Location

Beijing

ISSN

0271-4302

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-5760-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ISCAS.2013.6571800

Filename

6571800