On-Chip Power Monitoring: Leveraging High-Sensitivity Differential Temperature Sensors With Chopper Stabilization and Offset Calibration.

This paper introduces a differential temperature sensor that is tailored for on-chip thermal profiling to monitor the power dissipation of circuits. Chopper stabilization and analog offset calibration are integrated within the sensor circuit design to suppress low-frequency flicker noise and DC offsets, respectively. A prototype chip of the proposed temperature sensor with on-chip test heat sources was fabricated in a standard 65-nm CMOS process. A measured sensitivity of 21.1 mV/μW is achieved over a dynamic range of 34 μW, which is the highest sensitivity reported for an on-chip differential temperature sensor. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the described work is the first differential temperature sensor circuit with integrated chopping and automatic analog offset calibration, which allows to obtain high sensitivity within the dynamic range of interest. These results lay the foundation for on-chip thermal monitoring in future analog, digital, and RF systems-on-a-chips (SoCs).