A Low-Power, Process-and- Temperature- Compensated Ring Oscillator With Addition-Based Current Source

The design of a 1.8 GHz 3-stage current-starved ring oscillator with a process- and temperature- compensated current source is presented. Without post-fabrication calibration or off-chip components, the proposed low variation circuit is able to achieve a 65.1% reduction in the normalized standard deviation of its center frequency at room temperature and 85 ppm/
^°
C temperature stability with no penalty in the oscillation frequency, the phase noise or the start-up time. Analysis on the impact of transistor scaling indicates that the same circuit topology can be applied to improve variability as feature size scales beyond the current deep submicron technology. Measurements taken on 167 test chips from two different lots fabricated in a standard 90 nm CMOS process show a 3x improvement in frequency variation compared to the baseline case of a conventional current-starved ring oscillator. The power and area for the proposed circuitry is 87 μW and 0.013 mm
²
compared to 54 μ W and 0.01 mm
²
in the baseline case.