Smart temperature sensor for thermal testing of cell-based ICs

In this paper we present a simple and efficient built-in temperature sensor for thermal monitoring of standard-cell based VLSI circuits. The proposed smart temperature sensor uses a ring-oscillator composed of complex gates instead of inverters to optimize their linearity. Simulation results from a 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS technology show that the nonlinearity error of the sensor can be reduced when an adequate set of standard logic gates is selected.