Spintronic memristor based temperature sensor design with CMOS current reference

As the technology scales down, the increased power density brings in significant system reliability issues. Therefore, the temperature monitoring and the induced power management become more and more critical. The thermal fluctuation effects of the recently discovered spintronic memristor make it a promising candidate as a temperature sensing device. In this paper, we carefully analyzed the thermal fluctuations of spintronic memristor and the corresponding design considerations. On top of it, we proposed a temperature sensing circuit design by combining spintronic memristor with the traditional CMOS current reference. Our simulation results show that the proposed design can provide high accuracy of temperature detection within a much smaller footprint compared to the traditional CMOS temperature sensor designs. As magnetic device scales down, the relatively high power consumption is expected to be reduced. © 2012 EDAA.