A Power and Area Efficient CMOS Bandgap Reference Circuit with an Integrated Voltage-Reference Branch

Abstract

This work presents a compact and low power bandgap voltage reference design using self-biased current mirror circuit. This design eliminates the standard complementary-to-absolute-temperature (CTAT) bipolar device in the voltage-reference branch, reducing the bipolar area by 20 percent. Instead, the design shares the same bipolar device in the main CTAT branch for generating the reference voltage. An additional benefit of eliminating the voltage-reference branch is the reduction of total power consumption by approximately 30 percent. This novel topology reduces power and area of the core bandgap reference circuit without compromising temperature drift performance. Designed, fabricated and functionally tested in a 0.6 um CMOS process. The simulation result shows the temperature coefficient of this design is 6.3 ppm/C for a temperature range of -40C to 125C$. This bandgap reference design occupies a silicon area of 0.018 mm^2 and draws an average quiescent current of 2 uA from a supply voltage of 3.3-5V. The simulated flicker voltage noise is 4.34 uV/sqrt-Hz at 10 Hz.