Placement of temperature sensors under process variations

Variations occur inevitably in temperature sensor from process variations. To tackle the former variations, a relative temperature sensor is proposed and explored in this paper. It eliminates the process variations in temperature measurement and improves area efficiency. The new temperature sensor is able to provide accurate temperature information. Compared with the absolute temperature sensor where maximum temperature error could be as high as 15°C, our relative temperature sensor shows 4.4°C maximum temperature error with 75% area reduction (m = 8) using 1um wide metal connection, and 3.8°C maximum temperature error with 3% area overhead (m = 8) using 10um wide metal connection, in the best case.