Special Topic of Cryogenic Integrated Circuits Design
XU Boshen, GUO Yanshu, ZHENG Yuanjin
Temperature is a key variable that impacts the performance, reliability, and energy efficiency of modern integrated circuits. Leveraging the low cost and high integration of standard CMOS processes, CMOS temperature sensors have become widely deployed in conventional temperature ranges for consumer, automotive, power/battery-management, and SoC thermal-monitoring applications. Meanwhile, emerging cryogenic electronics,especially quantum computing,drives on-chip thermometry toward 77 K, 4 K, and even sub-kelvin regimes, where continuous sensing across room-to-cryogenic temperatures and calibration portability become major challenges. This paper provides a systematic review of CMOS temperature-sensing technologies spanning room temperature to cryogenic operation. We first summarize mainstream room-temperature implementations, including hybrid BJT/MOS PTAT/CTAT schemes, resistor-based sensors using various TCR elements, and time/frequency-domain readouts (e.g., ring-oscillator approaches), and compare their uncertainty, energy, area, and calibration cost. We then discuss how cryogenic device physics,such as BJT freeze-out, MOS threshold-voltage evolution, and the behavior of SiGe devices,affects transduction gain, linearity, and mismatch/noise. Finally, we survey representative Cryo-CMOS temperature sensors targeting 4 K and beyond, together with their linearization and calibration strategies, and highlight key trade-offs in temperature range, resolution, power, area, and scalability for multi-point thermal monitoring in both conventional SoCs and quantum-control ICs.