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Time-Domain Smart Temperature Sensor Using Current Starved Inverters and Switched Ring Oscillator-Based Time-to-Digital Converter

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Abstract

This article reports a time-domain smart temperature sensor using current starved inverters (CSIs) and switched ring oscillator-based time-to-digital converter (SRO-TDC) in a standard \({180} \hbox { nm}\) CMOS process. A novel temperature-to-time converter (TTC) is proposed using complementary delay lines, which are designed by utilising CSIs. The proportional to absolute temperature delay line offers a temperature coefficient (TC) of 615 ppm/\(^{\circ }\hbox {C}\), whereas the complementary to absolute temperature delay line possesses a TC of 300 ppm/\(^{\circ }\hbox {C}\), over 0–100 \(^{\circ }\hbox {C}\) temperature range. A novel multipath delay cell-based coupled oscillator is proposed for SRO-TDC. The proposed SRO-TDC operates as readout circuit for the sensor, which achieves 30 ns range at 12 ps resolution. The uncertainty of the sensor is limited to \(\pm \,0.63\,^{\circ }\hbox {C}\), after the 2-point calibration at \(20\,^{\circ }\hbox {C}\) and \(80\,^{\circ }\hbox {C}\), which is because of complementary delay lines in TTC and noise shaping behaviour of the SRO-TDC. The sensor achieves \(0.4\,\upmu \hbox {s}\) conversion time at \(0.04\,^{\circ }\hbox {C}\) resolution.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by Visvesvaraya PhD Scheme for Electronics & IT, MeitY, Govt. of India, Grant No. PhDMLA/4(29)/2015-16/01 and Special Manpower Development Programme for Chips-to-System Design, MeitY, Govt. of India, Grant No. 9(1)/2014-MDD (Vol III). Semi-Conductor Laboratory, Department of Space, Government of India, is acknowledged for valuable support. Amrita Dikshit is also acknowledged for her contribution.

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  1. Department of ECE, NIT Durgapur, Durgapur, India

    R. S. S. M. R. Krishna, Ashis Kumar Mal & Rajat Mahapatra

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  1. R. S. S. M. R. Krishna
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Krishna, R.S.S.M.R., Mal, A.K. & Mahapatra, R. Time-Domain Smart Temperature Sensor Using Current Starved Inverters and Switched Ring Oscillator-Based Time-to-Digital Converter. Circuits Syst Signal Process 39, 1751–1769 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-019-01233-8

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