A Compact 10-MHz RC Frequency Reference With a Versatile Temperature Compensation Scheme

This article presents the design and implementation of a compact CMOS RC frequency reference. It consists of a frequency-locked loop (FLL) that locks the period of a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) to the time an RC network takes to charge to a reference voltage. Conventionally, an RC time constant with a near-zero temperature coefficient (TC) is realized by using a trimmed network of resistors with different TCs. In this work, such a network is used to realize a temperature-dependent reference voltage whose TC cancels that of a single-resistor RC time constant. Compared with the conventional approach, which requires resistors with TCs of opposite polarity, the proposed approach can be implemented with resistors with TCs of similar polarity, and so it can be implemented in most CMOS processes. To compensate for RC spread, a trimmed capacitor is used to adjust the nominal frequency. Two prototype chips were made, one based on p- /n-polysilicon resistors and other based on silicided/p-diffusion resistors. Fabricated in a standard 180-nm CMOS technology, the polysilicon-based prototype has an active area of 0.01 mm2 and an absolute inaccuracy of ±2800 ppm from −45 °C to 125 °C with a fixed TC-trim and a one-point frequency trim. After one week of accelerated aging at 150 °C, however, significant drift (5000 ppm) was observed. The diffusion-based prototype exhibits greater inaccuracy (±14 400 ppm) but much less drift (600 ppm).