Extremely-Wide-Range Supply-Independent CMOS Voltage References for Telemetry-Powering Applications

This paper reports a voltage reference circuit in standard CMOS process. It exhibits excellent supply independency for a wide input voltage range, which is of great importance in telemetry-powered systems. This circuit is based on the well-known VGS-reference supply-independent current reference circuit, but it is designed to serve as a voltage reference. While the reference current generated by this circuit varies with the supply voltage, a self-compensating mechanism can be found in voltage-mode operation of the circuit that results in a supply-independent reference voltage. This supply independency is well observed in the static operation of the circuit over an extremely wide input range, as well as in its dynamic behavior for high frequency ripples on the input voltage. Based on the proposed idea, a multi-output voltage reference and a CMOS DC level shifter are also designed. The proposed voltage reference circuits have been fabricated using MOSIS 1.6 mum standard CMOS process. The basic voltage reference provides 957 muV/V static supply dependency, rejects input ripples of up to 8 MHz by 60+/- 3dB, and consumes only 15.8-36.9 muA when the input voltage varies in the range 2.6-12 V.