Andreas,

Thanks for taking the time to respond. Actually I've seen many of your postings on eevblog and here - you've clearly done a great deal of work in this area and would like to thank you for making it available to us all.

On 11/09/2014 06:07, Andreas Jahn wrote:
Hello,

many questions I will keep it short:

All ageing specs are "typical" if you want to have "guaranteed" values you will have to measure it over a reasonable time. (I recommend min 6 months). Every treatment (soldering, mechanical/temperature shock) of a reference may create a new ageing cycle with different slope.

True. I guess that the new ageing cycle from soldering in an LM399 is not going to be as bad as that for a surface mount plastic device.


So 100ppm/15 years outside of "lab conditions" (23 deg , constant humidity) is something that I would not guarantee without re-calibration.

I had a feeling that would be the answer - though surely humidity shouldn't be a factor as these are hermetic parts. The questions remains though, what level might you specify - if you were forced to come up with a number (ok a guess!) - for non-selected, non-pre-aged parts after 15years continuous operation without re-calibration? Obviously this is given the context of the presumably limited numbers of samples you've tested and I guess you wouldn't have bothered to further test early rejects.

Although typical drift of pre-aged + selected references will be in the 1-2ppm/year range if properly treated.

What would you classify as pre-aged? Do they need to be powered up or can they be maintained at a suitable temperature? How many rejects would you expect to get to get one that achieves 1-2ppm?

Is it known if the major instrument manufacturers preselect and burn-in LM399s themselves for their middle-range instruments? I'm pretty sure the top end kit will be all use carefully tested and selected parts, but what about a 34401A for example? The basic accuracy spec for that is 20ppm for 90 days, 35ppm for 12 months so even a 20ppm guaranteed part wouldn't be good enough, especially allowing margin for drift in other components. I guess I just answered my own question!


Also its meaningless if you want to have LT or National (TI) parts since LT is the only manufacturer which still produces them.
With high demands you will also have to sort out the "noisy" references.

Some "typical" LM399 (all from NS) ageing data can be found on web:

http://www.gellerlabs.com/LM299AH-20_Case_Study.htm

That's very interesting. I have to agree that the raw data looks suspect. I wonder what the rejection rate is for this 20ppm selection and does it mean that non-selected parts have a high probability of being worse than 20ppm?

http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/lm399-based-10-v-reference/msg478496/#msg478496

With best regards

Andreas


I just came across another part which looks very interesting given its low cost - the automotive qualified REF5050-Q1. Although its only spec'd as 3ppm/C typical, 8ppm/C max, that's using the box method over -40 to +125C. The 'typical' chart however, figure 4, page 5 shows the gradients to be very flat between 25 and 50. Its typical of course, so real parts may be very different aka Vishay foil resistors. The 0 to 85C histogram, fig 1 on page 5, do show the majority of parts being in the range .75ppm/C to 1.75ppm/C which is pretty good, and with luck, in the 25 to 50C range may well be much better so a crude heating arrangement may be worthwhile (made easier by the 5050's temperature output!)

I can't reconcile fig 4 with the histograms though; from the chart I reckon the 0-85 typical is approx 65ppm/85C = .76ppm/C and for -40 to 125C is approx 310ppm/165C = 1.88ppm/C. Figs 1 and 2 though show modal values of 1.25 and 2.25/2.5ppm/C. Am I doing something wrong or are these specs inconsistent?

Even more surprising is the headline feature on page 1:

"EXCELLENT LONG-TERM STABILITY:
 – 5 ppm/1000 hr (typ) after 1000 hours"

Unfortunately that seems to be an error as the 'typical' spec on page 4 is:
90ppm (0-1000 hours)
10ppm (1000 to 2000 hours).

The chart (fig 23, page 8) showing 1000 to 2000 hour drift of 96 parts show the worst case being +25ppm, with the bulk ending approx between 0 and 15ppm. I wonder if they carry on improving after 2kHrs?

That's definitely not the SQRT(1kHr) characteristic and is very different from the standard REF5050 which quotes 100ppm (1st 100hours), 50ppm (1000 to 2000 hours).

If you are in a position to pre-age them for 1000 hours that 10ppm spec is almost as good as the LM399 and best of all, TI quote a price of $1.60 @ 1k parts, compared to $4.65 for LM399s @ 1k from Linear. One off prices are rather more at $4.15 from Digikey (part no REF5050AQDRQ1) but again is still a lot cheaper than an LM399 at $9.92. At $1.60 and .8mA supply current, using 4, 8 or even dozens is a realistic proposition to exploit statistical improvements and noise reduction.

Noise is a bit high at 15uVpp. They're also trimmable. Shame there isn't an hermetic part though.

Anybody tried these or spotted the gotchas? Alternatively has anyone here evaluated the hermetic LTC6655 for long term drift?

Tony H

Am 11.09.2014 um 01:00 schrieb Tony:
I've just noticed that TI and Linear's specs for 'Long Term Stability' (typical) are different. TI state 20ppm/1000Hr while Linear state 8ppm/SQRT(kHr). That's a big difference - is this likely to be a real difference or just specmanship?

I note that Linear (in Note 4) also state that "Devices with maximum guaranteed long-term stability of 20ppm/SQRT(kH) are available." Presumably they would be a special order as there doesn't appear to be a unique part no. Would they be likely to be much more expensive?

Then on page 4 Linear show a graph of long term performance of 44 units (rather cheekily starting the graph at 2 months or approx 1500 hours!). To reproduce something approaching the mean curve using the formulae (drift ppm/SQRT(kHr)) x SQRT(month * 24 * 30.5/1000), requires me to use 2.2ppm/SQRT(kHr). That is way less than the typical 8.5ppm value.

To get a curve that resembles the 3-sigma curve requires a value of 5.7ppm/SQRT(kHr) which is still better than that 8ppm typical figure.

I'm not sure how to interpret this; what value would you use if you were designing a reference that isn't going to be re-calibrated after the initial calibration and you don't intend to burn in for several months?

Assuming the equipment is expected to have a 15 year life, operating in a range of 0 to 40C, what maximum total drift would you be comfortable specifying? I'd prefer it to be less than 100ppm, but that would require a drift of < 9ppm/SQRT(kHr), but that assumes that the SQRT(KHr) drift characteristic is valid for periods much longer than 12 months.

Are there any other references, at similiar or lower cost, that could be reasonably guaranteed to have a total drift of < 100ppm after 15years?

Is it reasonable to assume that there are some types of voltage reference will always drift, albeit noisily, in one direction allowing the original calibration to be offset to some extent to reduce the maximum error over its lifetime?

Having looked at several application notes and lots of datasheets, in those that include graphs of drift over 1kHrs or so of several 'typical' examples, I have not been able to see any meaningful correlation between the specified typical 1k drift figures and the graphs. Eg. in Linear's Design Note 229 (Don't Be Fooled By Voltage Reference Long-Term Drift and Hysteresis" the graphs of drift for the LT1461S8 and the LT1790SOT23 show very different drift after 1600 hours - in the range 50 to 130 for the former and approx -5 to +45 for the latter, yet the LT1461 is spec'd at 60ppm/SQRT(1kHr) and the LT17910 at 50ppm.

I realise that I would probably need to contact the manufacturers for real answers but its been my experience that they aren't often interested if you're not buying large volumes, and I know that a lot of people here have a lot of experience in this area.

Thanks,
  Tony H
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