Effect of parasitic series resistances and spurious currents on the extracted temperature of a bipolar junction...

Verster's proposition to directly extract the temperature of a bipolar junction transistor using its collector current is widely used. However, the resulting temperature is low accurate even when calibrated. Here, it is demonstrated that the misuse of the emitter current instead of the collector one, because of the presence of spurious currents other than the injection-diffusion one and transistor parasitic series resistances both contribute to the observed inaccuracy. Particularly parasitic series resistances increase the inaccuracy and introduce a strong dependence of the extracted temperature on the collector currents used to extract the temperature; the higher those resistances the higher the inaccuracy. A proposition is made to reduce the effect of those resistances on the inaccuracy of this thermometric element, which allows obtaining a more accurate value on a wider range of the collector probe currents.