LOW THERMAL DRIFT INTEGRATED CURRENT SOURCES FOR LOW VOLTAGE APPLICATIONS

摘要

Design of high performances integrated current references is often not easy due to low quality of available resistors; in particular tolerance and thermal drift of CMOS integrated resistances are very large. Recently some CMOS current references which do not use resistors have been reported. However in this paper we will show that proper design allows easy integration of thermally stable current references in any standard process. Furthermore, based on these theoretical results, a new low thermal drift integrated current source for very low voltage applications has been designed, the proposed current reference does not need any start up circuit, if a reference voltage is yet available, and does not need any frequency compensation, so resulting in small chip area.