Low-voltage low-power fast-settling CMOS operational transconductance amplifiers for switched-capacitor applications

The authors present a new fully differential operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) for low-voltage and fast-settling switched-capacitor circuits in pure digital CMOS technology. The proposed two-stage OTA is a hybrid class A/AB that combines a folded cascode as the first stage with active current mirrors as the second stage. Owing to the class AB operation in the second stage, slew limiting occurs only in the first stage, resulting in low power dissipation for switched -capacitor circuits. It employs a novel hybrid cascode compensation scheme, merged Ahuja and improved Ahuja style compensations, for fast settling. A design procedure for the minimum settling time of the proposed OTA is described. To demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed OTA and its compensation method three design examples are also provided.