Abstract
This chapter presents a family of current-mode relaxation oscillators that can be designed either as a compensated digital clock source, or as an oscillator-based sensor whose frequency reports the temperature or supply voltage. One compensated timer implementation in 0.18 \(\upmu \)m CMOS achieves a figure of merit of 120 pW/kHz, making it one of the most efficient relaxation oscillators reported to date. The oscillator design is then extended to produce a \(V_{DD}\)-controlled oscillator and a temperature-controlled oscillator. Finally, we introduce a low-power hybrid oscillator sensor, which encodes measurements of both the supply voltage and temperature into the durations of its two alternating digital clock phases. The underlying dual-phase current-mode relaxation oscillator and the resulting sensor circuits are easy to implement, are area- and energy-efficient, and offer straightforward power and speed tradeoffs for a wide range of applications.
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Acknowledgements
This work was funded in part by grant FA8650-18-2-7851 from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). C. R. Tulloss is also grateful for support from the Jayakumar Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship.
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Dai, S., Tulloss, C.R., Lian, X., Hu, K., Reda, S., Rosenstein, J.K. (2021). Low Power Current-Mode Relaxation Oscillators for Temperature and Supply Voltage Monitoring. In: Calimera, A., Gaillardon, PE., Korgaonkar, K., Kvatinsky, S., Reis, R. (eds) VLSI-SoC: Design Trends. VLSI-SoC 2020. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 621. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81641-4_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81641-4_3
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