Subthreshold operation of Nauta´s operational transconductance amplifier

Author

Irfansyah, Astria Nur ; Nicholson, Andrew ; Jenkins, Julian ; Hamilton, Tara Julia ; Lehmann, Torsten

Author_Institution

Sch. of Electr. Eng. & Telecommun., Univ. of New South Wales, Kensington, NSW, Australia

fYear

2015

fDate

7-10 June 2015

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

4

Abstract

This paper investigates the subthreshold operation of the inverter-based operational transconductance amplifier for the potential use in very low power data conversion systems. Circuit analysis and sizing strategies are presented, and a first order continuous-time delta-sigma modulator circuit is used as a case study to verify the performance of the amplifier when operating in subthreshold region. We demonstrate experimental results using a digitally configurable Nauta operational transconductance amplifier implemented in a 180nm CMOS process which shows up to 97.76 percent power reduction when 600mV is used instead of 1.8V as supply with better figure of merit and without significant signal-to-noise distortion ratio penalty highlighting its significant potential at subthreshold operation.

Keywords

CMOS digital integrated circuits; delta-sigma modulation; low-power electronics; operational amplifiers; CMOS process; circuit analysis; digitally configurable Nauta operational transconductance amplifier; first order continuous-time delta-sigma modulator circuit; inverter-based operational transconductance amplifier; size 180 nm; sizing strategies; subthreshold operation; very low power data conversion systems; voltage 600 mV; CMOS integrated circuits; CMOS process; Inverters; Modulation; Semiconductor device modeling; Transconductance; Tuning;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

New Circuits and Systems Conference (NEWCAS), 2015 IEEE 13th International

Conference_Location

Grenoble

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/NEWCAS.2015.7182065

Filename

7182065