Temperature is fundamentally important not only to physics, but also to all sciences, industry, commerce, and everyday life. As a phenomenon related to the absolute temperature, the random thermal motion of the electrons in a conductive resistor gives a voltage noise proportional to the temperature, and this phenomenon is called Johnson noise. The Johnson noise thermometry (JNT) is based on measuring the electronic noise spectrum or power of a resistor in thermal equilibrium. This method is extremely linear from a few kelvins to over one thousand kelvins. This powerful observation has motivated numerous scientists to develop accurate JNTs to rival those traditional primary thermometers, such as ideal gas thermometers and radiation thermometers. For example, for the last decade, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has made great efforts on developing JNTs, which have a wide temperature range and minimal involvement of the material properties. However, even with all these contributions, most of the JNT solutions are still bulky and very slow.

In this work, an integrated circuit (IC) solution to the JNTs in the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology is discussed. By moving to an IC solution, the speed bottleneck is eliminated, and the proposed IC-based JNT can operate at the speed that is hundreds of times faster than the JNTs with discrete components. As an initial exploration of the CMOS JNT system, this work reviews the existing solutions and techniques as the JNT basics. The challenges of the existing designs, as well as the advantages of CMOS implementations, are discussed.

In addition, as the main part of this project, the analyses of the JNT designs in the CMOS technology are emphasis and are firstly provided in this work. The analyses in this work include the noise analysis of the CMOS preamplifier, the speed requirement, and the resolution requirement on the analog-to-digital converter detection circuit. At last, the simulation results and test results are provided to verify the concept of this IC JNT solution.