High-Accuracy Time-Mode Duty-Cycle-Modulation-Based Temperature Sensor for Energy-Efficient System Applications

This paper presents a new time-mode duty-cycle-modulation-based high-accuracy temperature sensor. Different from the well-known \({\varSigma }{\varDelta }\) ADC-based readout structure, this temperature sensor utilizes a temperature-dependent oscillator to convert the temperature information into temperature-related time-mode parameter values. The useful output information of the oscillator is the duty cycle, not the absolute frequency. In this way, this time-mode duty-cycle-modulation-based temperature sensor has superior performance over the conventional inverter-chain-based time domain types. With a linear formula, the duty-cycle output streams can be converted into temperature values. The design is verified in 65nm standard digital CMOS process. The verification results show that the worst temperature inaccuracy is kept within 1\(\,^{\circ }\mathrm{C}\) with a one-point calibration from \(-\)55 to 125 \(^{\circ }\mathrm{C}\). At room temperature, the average current consumption is only 0.8 \(\upmu \)A (1.1\(\,\upmu \)A in one phase and 0.5 \(\upmu \)A in the other) with 1.2 V supply voltage, and the total energy consumption for a complete measurement is only 0.384 \({\hbox {nJ}}\).