An Autocalibrated All-Digital Temperature Sensor for On-Chip Thermal Monitoring

Abstract

This brief presents an autocalibrated all-digital temperature sensor circuit for use with on-chip thermal sensing applications. The proposed temperature sensor eliminates the need for two-temperature-point calibration in prior temperature sensors. Therefore, temperature sensor calibration efforts in high-volume production can be significantly reduced. The proposed design uses reference clock period information to perform self-calibration, and thus, effects of process variation can be removed. Subsequently, the accuracy of the proposed temperature sensor can be improved with very small area cost and low power consumption. The temperature sensor is implemented with a standard performance 65-nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology. The core area is 0.01 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> , and the power consumption of the proposed circuit is 150 μW with a 1-V supply. Since the proposed temperature sensor can be easily calibrated with a reference clock, the proposed design is very suitable for dynamic thermal management applications in a system-on-a-chip era.