Quantum mechanics

Voltage

Engineering

Capacitance

Materials science

Low-power electronics

Operational amplifier

Power (physics)

Amplifier

Computer science

Slew rate

Transistor

Physics

Transconductance

Electronic engineering

Artificial intelligence

Gain–bandwidth product

Electrode

Power consumption

Class (philosophy)

CMOS

Operational transconductance amplifier

Optoelectronics

Electrical engineering

IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems

In this article, a new solution for an ultralow-voltage (ULV) ultralow-power (ULP) operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) is presented. Thanks to the combination of a low-voltage bulk-driven nontailed differential stage with the multipath Miller zero compensation technique, a simple class AB power-efficient ULV structure has been obtained, which can operate from supply voltages less than the threshold voltages of the employed MOS transistors, while offering rail-to-rail input common-mode range at the same time. The proposed OTA was fabricated using the 180-nm CMOS process from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and can operate from VDD ranging from 0.3 to 0.5 V. The 0.3-V version dissipates only 12.6 nW of power while showing a 64.7-dB voltage gain at 1-Hz, 2.96-kHz gain-bandwidth product, and a 4.15-V/ms average slew-rate at 30-pF load capacitance. The measured results agree well with simulations.

A Compact 0.3-V Class AB Bulk-Driven OTA