Variation Resilient Power Sensor With an 80-ns Response Time for Fine-Grained Power Management

This paper presents real-time on-chip power and temperature sensors that provide fine-grained estimates for power consumption in systems-on-chip and also provide a concurrent temperature estimate for dynamic power and temperature management. This sensor occupies an area of 0.01 mm
²
in a 0.13-μm CMOS technology. With a simplified one-point calibration and a response time of 80 ns, it shows improvements in input dynamic range by ten times, response time by six times, and sensitivity by three times over previous such sensors. A compact low-power current reference with a 3-σmax TC of 127 ppm/°C and a line regulation of 1%/V is also presented, which is used in a replica-structure-based online calibration scheme, resulting in improved tolerance to variations in process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) and degradation due to supply noise as well as aging.