Systematic design of bandgap voltage reference using precomputed lookup tables

Abstract

Bandgap voltage references are indispensable in any analog/mixed-signal system. In this paper, we introduce a systematic gm/ID-based procedure to design a CMOS bandgap reference. The proposed iterative methodology relies on one-time-generated precomputed lookup tables (LUTs); thus, it does not require invoking a simulator in the loop. Despite the inherent finite accuracy of the LUT-based design approach, we demonstrate that a precision bandgap circuit can be designed with less than 1-ppm error. We verified the proposed procedure against the Spectre simulations and probed the design space using a symbolic circuit solver. Moreover, we demonstrated how variations and mismatch can be taken into account in the context of the proposed methodology. The results demonstrate that the proposed procedure can provide very accurate results in a short execution time, enabling the designer to explore the design space of key performance metrics, such as power-supply rejection (PSR) and noise.