A 140 pW, –77 dB PSRR, PMOS-Only Voltage Reference Using Pre-Regulation Technique With Gate and Bulk Feedback

This brief proposes a sub-nW PMOS-only voltage reference (VR) for low-power application. The proposed VR uses a 2-transitor (2-T) pre-regulation (PR) circuit to supply a 2-T core circuit for reducing the dependence of the reference voltage <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$(V_{\mathrm { REF}})$ </tex-math></inline-formula> on the supply voltage <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$(V_{\mathrm { DD}})$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. Both the core and the PR circuit are biased by the leakage current of the PMOS transistors. Gate and bulk feedback are utilized in the PR circuit to further improve the line sensitivity (LS) and the power supply rejection ratio (PSRR) without any other extra transistors. The proposed design is fabricated in the standard 0.18-<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu $ </tex-math></inline-formula>m CMOS process, while 7 samples have been measured. The design can generate a <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{\mathrm { REF}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> of 235.6 mV and consume a supply current of 0.31 nA under a minimum <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{\mathrm { DD}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> of 0.45 V at 25°C. The PSRRs measured at frequencies of 100 Hz and 1 kHz are −77 dB and −72 dB respectively. Moreover, the average LS is 0.033%/V when the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{\mathrm { DD}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> varies from 0.45 V to 1.8 V. The average temperature coefficient (TC) is 66.3 ppm/°C without trimming over the temperature range of −40°C to 85°C. The minimum power consumption is 140 pW, and the chip area is only 0.0007 mm2.