Winner, Name that Ware July 2026

The structure in question for last month’s ware are a pair of NPN transistors that form the core of a bandgap voltage reference circuit. As its name implies, a bandgap voltage reference generates a near-constant voltage for use inside chips. The voltage is intended to be fairly constant over process variations, temperature variations, and power supply fluctuations. The circuit itself is extremely clever, using circuit elements that have offsets that move in opposite directions with temperature to cancel each other out. Without this circuit, chips would have performance characteristics that strongly depend upon its operating temperature. Therefore, almost every system on chip has at least one of these. If you’re ever looking at a chip micrograph, the circuit will jump out because it’s likely to be the only thing that has two arrays of perfectly square NPN transistors next to each other. I’ve highlighted the active transistors in pink. In this case, the transistor ratio is 1:64. Modern…