CMOS threshold voltage extractor circuits and theirs applications in VLSI designs

Two new threshold voltage extractor circuits,will be presented. In order to achieve a full CMOS compatibility, only MOS transistors working in saturation will be used, resulting very small silicon areas consumption (22/spl mu/mx15/spl mu/m and 33/spl mu/mx23/spl mu/m, respectively). The quantitative evaluation of the threshold voltage computing error will be made taking into account the second-order effects, which affect the MOS transistor operation. The SPICE simulations confirm the theoretical estimations: a linear decreasing with temperature of the threshold voltage and relatively small values of the temperature coefficients of reference voltages (22ppm/K and 16ppm/K, respectively). The very small supply voltage (1.5V) makes the proposed circuits valuable for low-voltage applications.