Design of a fully integrated CMOS highly temperature stable frequency reference

Design of a fully integrated CMOS highly temperature stable frequency reference

Tsiolis, G.

Serdijn, W.A. (mentor)

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Electrical Engineering

Microelectronics

2011-11-28

A new fully integrated frequency reference has been designed, fabricated and measured. The goal of the design procedure has been high stability of the frequency over temperature variations. This should be achieved using a CMOS technology without MEMS and crystals, while being restricted by a very low power budget. The frequency is designed based on an RC time constant, where both R and C are integrated on chip. The novel topology is minimizing the sources of error that affect the frequency being produced (minimum offsets and delays that spread over temperature). According to the simulations, the fabricated oscillator is a competitive one among the RC-time-constant based ones, but the measurements showed that the tradeoff between performance and integration (accompanied with power minimization) is worse than its counterparts (MEMs based or LC based all-silicon choices), or its quartz crystal based ancestor. Ways to increase the quality even further are proposed.

fully integrated
CMOS
all silicon
highly temperature stable
frequency reference
clock
RC time constant
no PLL
no MEMS
low power

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:238c86a5-ea5b-4dc8-9ff0-9bc5f490a779

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2011 Tsiolis , G.