A computer-aided approach for voltage reference circuit design

This work presents a computer-aided design (CAD) approach for voltage reference circuits by controlling main characteristics of voltage references, such as temperature coefficient, power consumption, mismatch due to the manufacturing process, transistor area, and output noise. The CAD tool and the proposed methodology allow the designer to obtain accurate and optimum initial circuit sizing, thereby reducing the large number of computer runs usually required in voltage reference circuit designs. Shown in this paper, an illustrative design example was carried out in a 180nm CMOS process and verified by post layout simulations, whose results were in close agreement with the CAD tool predictions.