Systematic Design of Bandgap Voltage Reference Using Precomputed Lookup Tables

• Published in: IEEE access Vol. 7; pp. 100131 - 100142
• Main Authors: Omran, Hesham, Amer, Mohamed H., Mansour, Ahmed M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: bandgap voltage reference; Circuit design; CMOS; corners; Design; Electric potential; Energy gap; gm/ID methodology; Integrated circuit modeling; Lookup tables; Mathematical model; mismatch; noise; Performance measurement; Photonic band gap; PSR; Solid modeling; Systematic analog design; Systematics; Table lookup; Temperature dependence; Voltage
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2930595

Bandgap voltage references are indispensable in any analog/mixed-signal system. In this paper, we introduce a systematic gm/ID-based procedure to design a CMOS bandgap reference. The proposed iterative methodology relies on one-time-generated precomputed lookup tables (LUTs); thus, it does not require invoking a simulator in the loop. Despite the inherent finite accuracy of the LUT-based design approach, we demonstrate that a precision bandgap circuit can be designed with less than 1-ppm error. We verified the proposed procedure against the Spectre simulations and probed the design space using a symbolic circuit solver. Moreover, we demonstrated how variations and mismatch can be taken into account in the context of the proposed methodology. The results demonstrate that the proposed procedure can provide very accurate results in a short execution time, enabling the designer to explore the design space of key performance metrics, such as power-supply rejection (PSR) and noise.