A wide-range supply-independent CMOS voltage reference 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 V_GS-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, and also in its dynamic behavior for high frequency ripples on the input voltage. The circuit has been fabricated using a standard 1.6μm CMOS process, and provides 957 μV/V static supply dependency, rejects input ripples of up to 8MHz by 60 ± 3dB, and consumes only 15.8-36.9μA when the input voltage varies in the range 2.6-12V.