A CMOS current starved VCO for energy harvesting applications

Abstract

This work presents a current starved voltage-controlled oscillator based on standard 0.13μm CMOS process. Integrated within a power management circuit, the proposed oscillator provides an average periodic signal with a frequency of 84.81kHz. Additionally, to assure a stable periodic signal from the environmental instability a voltage reference is designed. The proposed architecture makes full use of subthreshold and deep triode MOSFETs to avoid the employment of any passive component. A voltage reference exhibits an output reference of 258.34mV in response to a 1.0-3.2V voltage supply. It shows a line sensitivity of 0.49%/V at 27°C. The output of the architecture leads to a robust time-control local oscillator, which can be employed in power management circuit for energy harvesting systems and be used on wireless sensor networks and implantable medical devices.