T4: Voltage and Current References: Architectures, Performance, and Applications
09:30 - 11:00
Auditorim B
chairs
Pieter Harpe (Eindhoven University of Technology, NL)
Piotr Kmon (AGH University, PL)
presenters
Martin Lefebvre (UCLouvain, BE)
Martin Lefebvre received the M.Sc. degree in Electromechanical Engineering from the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in 2017, and the Ph.D. degree, under the supervision of Prof. David Bol, in 2024. His current research interests include hardware-aware machine learning algorithms, low-power mixed-signal vision chips for embedded image processing, and ultra-low-power current references. He serves as a reviewer for various IEEE conferences and journals, including J. Solid-State Circuits, Trans. Circuits Syst. I and II, Trans. Biomed. Circuits Syst., and Trans. VLSI Syst.
David Bol (UCLouvain, BE)
David Bol is an Associate professor at UCLouvain. He received the Ph.D degree in Engineering Science from UCLouvain in 2008 in the field of ultra-low power digital nanoelectronics. In 2005, he was a visiting Ph.D student at the CNM, Sevilla, Spain, and in 2009, a postdoctoral researcher at intoPIX, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. In 2010, he was a visiting postdoctoral researcher at the UC Berkeley Lab for Manufacturing and Sustainability, Berkeley, CA. In 2015, he participated to the creation of e-peas semiconductors spin-off company, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. Prof. Bol leads the Electronic Circuits and Systems (ECS) group focused on ultra-low-power design of integrated circuits for environmental and biomedical IoT applications including computing, power management, sensing and wireless communications with a holistic focus on environmental sustainability. He is actively engaged in a social-ecological transition in the field of ICT research with a post-growth approach. Prof. Bol has authored more than 150 papers and conference contributions and holds three delivered patents. He (co-)received five Best Paper/Poster/Design Awards in IEEE conferences (ICCD 2008, SOI Conf. 2008, FTFC 2014, ISCAS 2020, ESSCIRC 2022) and supervised the PhD thesis of Charlotte Frenkel who was awarded the 2021 Nokia Bell Scientific Award and the 2021 IBM Innovation Award. He serves as a reviewer for various IEEE journals/conferences and presented several keynotes in international conferences. On the private side, Prof. Bol pioneered the parental leave among male professors in his faculty, to spend time connecting to nature with his family, in a post-growth deceleration.
abstract
Voltage and current references are important building blocks of integrated circuits, whose dependence to process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) variations directly impacts the performance of the analog and mixed-signal circuits they bias. In this tutorial, we will first go through common architectures of voltage and current references, with a focus on constant-with-temperature (CWT) ones, and detail their operation principle. Then, we will discuss their pros and cons in terms of performance. At last, we will provide an overview of their applications, examine the relevance of temperature independence in these contexts, and highlight the challenges to be tackled by further research.