A 0.6V Supply Ultra-Compact Voltage Reference Exploiting MOS Threshold Correlations

Voltage references provide a critical function to nearly any System-on-Chip (SoC) and will remain indispensable in future process nodes. New challenges arise from aggressive scaling, for example the degrading linearity of bipolar devices in FinFET CMOS [1]. While the classic bandgap reference may often provide a robust performance [2], it cannot serve the reduced supply headroom in modern technologies. Several alternative solutions were developed which can work in a Sub-1V domain, like in [3]-[5]. However, the pn-junction voltage at cold temperatures (- 0.8V) presents a physical limit for operation at very low supply. Hence, the decreasing (digital) core voltages of VDD ≤ 0.8V motivate a MOS-based reference, like in this paper.