A Ring Oscillator-based Temperature Sensor for

U-HealthcareGin 0.13m CMOS

Sung-Sik Woo, Jung-Hyup Lee, and SeongHwan Cho

Department of Electrical Engineering
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
Daejeon, Republic of Korea
polasis@kaist.ac.kr, hyup@ccs.kaist.ac.kr, chosta@ee.kaist.ac.kr

Abstract—In this paper, a low-power ring oscillator-based

temperature sensor designed for U-healthcare is presented.
Unlike conventional temperature sensors relying on power-
hungry bandgap references and ADCs, the proposed sensor
exploits the frequency of the ring oscillator that increases as
temperature increases as a way of converting temperature to a
digital output. Power of the sensor is also saved by stacking
circuits for charge recycling and carefully balancing top and
bottom circuits to make every circuit operate within 0.3~0.5V
voltage headroom when 0.8V supply voltage is used. The first
order noise shaping is realized by the ring oscillator and the
counter structure for higher resolution. Simulation results
indicate that the proposed temperature sensor has a resolution of
0.18ºC/LSB at 100Hz of conversion rate over a temperature
range of 5 to 100ºC. The power consumption of the proposed
temperature sensor is only 30nW and the area is only 0.05mm2 in
a standard 0.13m CMOS process.

Keywords-temperature sensor; ring oscillator; charge recycli-

ng; noise shaping;

I. INTRODUCTION
Recent years, a number of U-healthcare applications such
as a wireless sensor network for human body monitoring
system are growing considerably [1]. Desirable multi-sensor
Figure 1. Block diagram of the proposed temperature sensor.
node for the system must occupy small area, which in turn
requires every component to be integrated in a single chip.
Moreover, it is very attractive to scavenge energy from ambient
sources for powering the node, for example, human activity,
body heat, or light, so as to eliminate the need for batteries, however, the subthreshold voltage of 0.3V is used as a supply
which not only have a limited lifetime but are also a cost- voltage, which does not normally power other components and
prohibitive in many areas [2], [3], [4]. It should be noted that, hence brings about the need of DC to DC converter to make the
however, assuming 1cm x 1cm body area, obtainable power circuit compatible with overall system. In addition, it resets the
from energy harvesting is in the range of only a few W to tens counter after every output value is generated. Reset signal is
of W. This forces the amount of power that the components also implemented by [6], which disables one of the major
composing the chip consume as low as possible. advantages achievable from the ring oscillator based
In this sense, conventional temperature sensors based on architecture, the noise shaping.
bandgap reference and ADC with large power consumption are This paper presents a 30nW ring oscillator-based
not suitable in this application. The solution is to utilize a temperature sensor for U-healthcare. The proposed sensor uses
temperature-sensitive ring oscillator as a temperature indicator. charge recycling to increase supply voltage to 0.8V while
There have been several studies of ring oscillator based CMOS maintaining power consumption [7], [8], [9], and a better
temperature sensors for low-power applications [5], [6]. The resolution is achieved by the noise shaping.
lowest power consumption is achieved by [5] with good
resolution and dynamic range. For low power operation,

978-1-4244-5035-0/09/$26.00 ©2009 IEEE -548- ISOCC 2009

 Vmid
Figure 2. Current-starved and tunable inverter for ring oscillator.
II. PROPOSED CMOS TEMPERATURE SENSOR
The proposed CMOS temperature sensor comprises a ring
oscillator, a voltage level shifter, a 10-bit counter, and a 10-bit
register as shown in Fig. 1. The ring oscillator generates a
clock signal whose frequency increases as the temperature
increases. A current-starved inverter whose time delay is
tunable by 4 digital inputs is used to make the ring oscillator
frequency-tunable as shown in Fig. 2 [5]. Fig. 3 shows the
voltage level shifter which extends the reduced voltage level of
the ring oscillator output to full-scale to make sure that the
number of its rising edge is counted by the counter [7]. The
register saves the counter output at every positive edge of the
external clock. The difference between two successive register
outputs indicates the temperature.
A. Charge Recycling
Due to the need of DC to DC converter, low supply voltage
such as 0.3V for subthreshold operation is not practical when
the sensor is designed as a part of a system. In addition, simply
increasing the supply voltage cannot be a smart solution,
because when the supply voltage is increased N times, power
consumption is multiplied by N2. Taking into account the
increased frequency of ring oscillator in accordance with the
increased supply voltage, further increase in power
consumption is inevitable. However, the proposed temperature
sensor maintained power consumption regardless of the
increased supply voltage of 0.8V by stacking the counter and
the register on top of the ring oscillator and the clock generator,
as shown in Fig. 1.
Since there is no voltage regulator to source or sink charge
from the intermediate node, Vmid is self-determined by the
inherent charge balance between the top and bottom circuits [8].
Thus, careful balancing of the top and bottom circuits is needed
to ensure Vmid to be settled within the range of 0.3~0.5V to
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Figure 3. Voltage level shifter.
maintain sufficient voltage headroom for both top and bottom
circuits.
Another feature of the proposed circuit is the increment of
Vmid as temperature increases. That is because when
temperature increases, power consumption of the top circuits
increases more rapidly than the bottom circuits, triggering the
charge balancing action to make Vmid higher to decrease the
power consumption of the top circuits and increase the power
consumption of the bottom circuits, finally equalizing them.
This property has a positive effect on the resolution, since
higher Vmid leads to higher ring oscillator frequency, and in
turn higher frequency-to-temperature gain of the oscillator.
Also, lowest power consumption can be achieved by adjusting
Vmid at the lowest target temperature to become the lowest
voltage headroom for the bottom circuits through balancing the
top and bottom circuits. Although it is not essential, placing a
decoupling capacitor between intermediate node and ground
also has a positive effect on the sensor because it stabilizes
Vmid.
B. Noise Shaping
Since the counter is free-running without any reset signal,
the current quantization noise is correlated with the previous
one. As a result, just as the conventional VCO-based ADC
which consists of a VCO and a counter, the proposed
temperature sensor has the first-order noise shaping property
[10]. In this case, the noise transfer function (NTF) is given by
NTF(z) = 1 − z −1 (1)
which is high-pass whereas the signal transfer function (STF)
is all-pass.
The counter output is saved in the register at every rising
edge of the clock signal. Using MATLAB, the current register
output is subtracted by the previous one and several outputs are
added to produce a single value representing the temperature.
The number of outputs used for adding directly affects the
resolution. Assuming the case when the possible output value
corresponding to the target temperature range is 1, 2, and 3, by
adding two outputs, possible output now extends to 2, 3, 4, 5,
ISOCC 2009
 REGISTER
RING
COUNTER OSCILLATOR
LEVEL
SHIFTER
Figure 4. Layout of the proposed temperature sensor.
Figure 5. Temperature characteristic of the ring oscillator.
and 6. That is, the temperature range is divided by the output
values two times finer than before meaning that the resolution
gets two times higher. Extending this notion to adding N
outputs, the resolution gets approximately N times higher.
Therefore, when the perfect linearity of the temperature sensor
is assumed, the resolution can be expressed as
Tmax − Tmin 1 increases and threshold voltage of MOSFETs decreases, which
Resolution ≅ × (2)
Omax − Omin N
where Tmax and Tmax is the maximum and minimum
temperature in the target range, respectively, Omax and Omin is
the maximum and minimum output value before adding, and N
is the number of added outputs.
III. SIMULATION RESULTS
The proposed temperature sensor was implemented and
simulated in a 0.13m CMOS technology. The layout of the
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Figure 6. Temperature characteristic of the ring oscillator at 30 to 40|C.
Figure 7. Result of 100 outputs adding.
temperature sensor to be fabricated with an area of 0.05mm2 is
shown in Fig. 4.
The proposed temperature sensor can cover the temperature
range of 5 to 100ºC. It should be noted that, however, the ring
oscillator shows nonlinear temperature characteristic as shown
in Fig. 5. This is because as temperature increases, Vmid
makes the ring oscillator to go through different regions of
operation from subthreshold to above threshold. Limiting the
target temperature range to 30 to 40ºC for the application of
human body monitoring system, however, proves that the ring
oscillator has good linearity at the target range as shown in Fig.
6.
Fig. 7 shows the result of 100 outputs adding for each point
where the subtraction and adding is accomplished by
MATLAB. The effective resolution can be estimated from the
graph. Assuming the perfect linearity of the sensor and 10kHz
ISOCC 2009

Figure 8. Output spectrum of the proposed temperature sensor.
constant clock frequency which leads to 10k / 100 = 100Hz of
conversion rate, resolution = (100-5) / (530-12) = 0.18ºC/LSB.
Fig. 8 is a 4,000 sample FFT of the subtracted outputs which
shows that the sensor has a first-order noise shaping property.
According to the simulation result, the proposed
temperature sensor consumes 30.19nW at 27ºC. This is less
than 1/3 of the lowest power consumption of previous
temperature sensors, which is achieved by charge recycling
with careful balancing to lower the frequency of ring oscillator.
IV. CONCLUSION
A 30nW ring oscillator-based CMOS temperature sensor
has been presented. Extremely low power consumption is
achieved through charge recycling, which is to stack circuits
and make each circuit to actually operate within 0.3~0.5V
voltage headroom, although the supply voltage is 0.8V. Ring
oscillator and counter in the sensor composed first-order noise
shaping property just like the VCO-based ADCs. Although the
sensor exhibits nonlinear characteristic in its temperature range
of 5 to 100ºC, in the target temperature range of the wireless
sensor network for U-healthcare which is from 30 to 40ºC, the
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issue is cleared. Simple structure allowed the proposed
temperature sensor to feature low power and small chip area
while having high resolution.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by the Korea Science and
Engineering Foundation (KOSEF) grant funded by the Korea
government (MEST) under R01-2008-000-11892-0.
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