A Multiproject Chip Approach to the Teaching of Analog MOS LSI and VLSI

Multiproject chip implementation has been used in teaching analog MOS circuit design. After having worked with computer simulation and layout aids in homework problems, students designed novel circuits including several high performance op amps, an A/D converter, a switched capacitor filter, a 1 K dynamic RAM, and a variety of less conventional MOS circuits such as a VII converter, an AC/DC converter, an AM radio receiver, a digitally-controlled analog signal processor, and on-chip circuitry for measuring transistor capacitances. These circuits were laid out as part of an NMOS multiproject chip. Several of the designs exhibit a considerable degree of innovation; fabrication pending, computer simulation shows that some may be pushing the state of the art. Several designs are of interest to digital designers; in fact, the course has provided knowledge and technique needed for detailed digital circuit design at the gate level

High bandwidth low power operational amplifier design and compensation techniques

The need for high bandwidth operational amplifiers (op amp) exists for numerous applications. This need requires research in the area of Op Amp bandwidth extension. The exploited method in this thesis uses a class of compensation called Indirect Feedback Frequency Compensation in which the compensation current is fed back indirectly from the output to an internal high impedance node, to extend the bandwidth of an Op Amp. Among various compensation methods for operational amplifiers, indirect compensation offers potentially large benefits in regards to power to speed trade-off. The indirect compensated Op Amps can exhibit significant improvements in speed over traditional Miller compensated Op Amps and result in much smaller layout size and lower power consumption. However the technique has not been widely used in practice due to a lack of clear design procedure. This thesis develops an analytical description of how indirect compensation works and derives key trade off equations among various specifications. These results provide the insight needed for practically designing operational amplifiers with this technique. Based on the results, a step-by-step design procedure is proposed for an operational amplifier using indirect compensation. To demonstrate the proposed design procedure, a two stage Op Amp is designed. The Op Amp achieved a 2 MHz gain-bandwidth product (GBW) driving a large capacitive load (100 pF). The GBW of the Op Amp was improved by a factor of 10 times compared to the miller compensation scheme. The amplifier documented in this thesis achieved a higher simulated figures-of-merit (FoMs) compared to the state-of-art and can be directly used in integrated systems to achieve higher performance

A wideband linear tunable CDTA and its application in field programmable analogue array

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Hu, Z., Wang, C., Sun, J. et al. ‘A wideband linear tunable CDTA and its application in field programmable analogue array’, Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing, Vol. 88 (3): 465-483, September 2016. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 6 June 2017. The final publication is available at Springer via https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10470-016-0772-7 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016In this paper, a NMOS-based wideband low power and linear tunable transconductance current differencing transconductance amplifier (CDTA) is presented. Based on the NMOS CDTA, a novel simple and easily reconfigurable configurable analogue block (CAB) is designed. Moreover, using the novel CAB, a simple and versatile butterfly-shaped FPAA structure is introduced. The FPAA consists of six identical CABs, and it could realize six order current-mode low pass filter, second order current-mode universal filter, current-mode quadrature oscillator, current-mode multi-phase oscillator and current-mode multiplier for analog signal processing. The Cadence IC Design Tools 5.1.41 post-layout simulation and measurement results are included to confirm the theory.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

A HIGH PERFORMANCE FULLY DIFFERENTIAL PURE CURRENT MODE OPERATIONAL AMPLIFIER AND ITS APPLICATIONS

In this paper a novel high performance all current-mode fully-differential (FD) Current mode Operational Amplifier (COA) in BIPOLAR technology is presented. The unique true current mode simple structure grants the proposed COA the largest yet reported unity gain frequency while providing low voltage low power operation. Benefiting from some novel ideas, it also exhibits high gain, high common mode rejection ratio (CMRR), high power supply rejection ratio (PSRR), high output impedance, low input impedance and most importantly high current drive capability. Its most important parameters are derived and its performance is proved by PSPICE simulations using 0.8 μm BICMOS process parameters at supply voltage of ±1.2V indicating the values of 82.4 dB,52.3º, 31.5 Ω, 31.78 MΩ, 179.2 dB, 2 mW and 698 MHz for gain, phase margin, input impedance, output impedance, CMRR, power and unity gain frequency respectively. Its CMRR also shows very high frequency of 2.64 GHz at zero dB. Its very high PSRR+/PSRR- of 182 dB/196 dB makes the proposed COA a highly suitable block in Mixed-Mode (SOC) chips. Most favourably it can deliver up to ±1.5 mA yielding a high current drive capability exceeding 25. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed COA, it is used to realize a constant bandwidth voltage amplifier and a high performance Rm amplifier

Performance enhancement in the desing of amplifier and amplifier-less circuits in modern CMOS technologies.

In the context of nowadays CMOS technology downscaling and the increasing demand of high performance electronics by industry and consumers, analog design has become a major challenge. On the one hand, beyond others, amplifiers have traditionally been a key cell for many analog systems whose overall performance strongly depends on those of the amplifier. Consequently, still today, achieving high performance amplifiers is essential. On the other hand, due to the increasing difficulty in achieving high performance amplifiers in downscaled modern technologies, a different research line that replaces the amplifier by other more easily achievable cells appears: the so called amplifier-less techniques. This thesis explores and contributes to both philosophies. Specifically, a lowvoltage differential input pair is proposed, with which three multistage amplifiers in the state of art are designed, analysed and tested. Moreover, a structure for the implementation of differential switched capacitor circuits, specially suitable for comparator-based circuits, that features lower distortion and less noise than the classical differential structures is proposed, an, as a proof of concept, implemented in a ΔΣ modulator