An Open-Source and Autonomous Temperature Sensor Generator Verified With 64 Instances in SkyWater 130 nm for Comprehensive Design Space Exploration
Qirui Zhang, Wenbo Duan, R. Timothy Edwards, Tim Ansell, David Blaauw, Dennis Sylvester, Mehdi Saligane
Abstract
This letter presents an open-source framework for autonomous generation of tapeout-ready temperature sensors. This framework uses a leakage-based digital temperature sensor design as the template. A cell-based design methodology is employed to allow full synthesizability and compatibility with computer-aided designs (CADs) flow and advanced technology nodes. Furthermore, the generator automates the design flow end-to-end in Python and supports designing completely with open-source CAD tools. Verified with 64 instances in SkyWater 130 nm, the generator also enables low-effort silicon-proven design space exploration that unveils the characteristics of leakage-based digital temperature sensors, with the most efficient one achieving 9.7 pJ<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\cdot \text{K}^{2}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> FoM, −0.67/0.74 °C 3<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\sigma }$ </tex-math></inline-formula> inaccuracy, 130-nW power, and 24-mK resolution. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the world’s first open-source silicon-proven generator for temperature sensors.