Accurate Behavioral Simulator of All-Digital Time-Domain Smart Temperature Sensors by Using SIMULINK

This study proposes a new behavioral simulator that uses SIMULINK for all-digital CMOS time-domain smart temperature sensors (TDSTSs) for performing rapid and accurate simulations. Inverter-based TDSTSs offer the benefits of low cost and simple structure for temperature-to-digital conversion and have been developed. Typically, electronic design automation tools, such as HSPICE, are used to simulate TDSTSs for performance evaluations. However, such tools require extremely long simulation time and complex procedures to analyze the results and generate figures. In this paper, we organize simple but accurate equations into a temperature-dependent model (TDM) by which the TDSTSs evaluate temperature behavior. Furthermore, temperature-sensing models of a single CMOS NOT gate were devised using HSPICE simulations. Using the TDM and these temperature-sensing models, a novel simulator in SIMULINK environment was developed to substantially accelerate the simulation and simplify the evaluation procedures. Experiments demonstrated that the simulation results of the proposed simulator have favorable agreement with those obtained from HSPICE simulations, showing that the proposed simulator functions successfully. This is the first behavioral simulator addressing the rapid simulation of TDSTSs.