Kaito NAGAI and Kimiyoshi USAMI, Shibaura Institute of Technology, Japan

This paper proposes a Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) based temperature sensor that aims to operate with an ultra-low voltage electromotive force for IoT applications with energy harvesting. Sub-threshold circuit design was exploited for the operation at ultra-low supply voltage. The proposed circuit uses the characteristics of leakage current for temperature measurement. The virtual ground node in the proposed sensor is charged up by leakage current and the charging time changes with the temperature. To measure the temperature-dependent charging time, we used a buffer-chain based TDC to achieve ultra-low voltage operation. Simulation results demonstrated that the minimum supply voltage for the proposed circuit is 0.15V. The power consumption is 407nW and sensing time is 180ns at 25℃. The measurable temperature range is from -40℃ to 85℃. The proposed circuit was designed with Renesas SOTB 65nm process. Simulation evaluation was conducted using HSPICE.

Temperature sensor, ultra-low voltage, Time-to-Digital Converter, Sub-threshold