Recent advances on the design of high-gain wideband operational transconductance amplifiers

Abstract

Feed-forward techniques are explored for the design of high-frequency Operational Transconductance Amplifiers (OTAs). For single-stage amplifiers, a recycling folded-cascode OTA presents twice the GBW (197.2MHz versus 106.3MHz) and more than twice the slew rate (231.1V/ s versus 99.3V/ s) as a conventional folded cascode OTA for the same load, power consumption, and transistor dimensions. It is demonstrated that the efficiency of the recycling folded-cascode is equivalent to that of a telescopic OTA. As for multistage amplifiers, a No-Capacitor Feed-Forward (NCFF) compensation scheme which uses a high-frequency pole-zero doublet to obtain greater than 90dB DC gain, GBW of 325MHz and better than 70 °phase margin is discussed. The settling-time- of the NCFF topology can be faster than that of OTAs with Miller compensation. Experimental results for the recycling folded-cascode OTA fabricated in TSMC 0.18 m CMOS, and results of the NCFF demonstrate the efficiency and feasibility of the feed-forward schemes. Copyright © 2009 R. Assaad and J. Silva-Martinez.