Narrow Results

This paper presents a supper class-AB adaptive biasing bulk-driven amplifier for ultra-low-power applications. In the proposed structure, two bulk-driven flipped voltage follower (FVF) cells are reconfigured as nonlinear tail currents using quasi-floating gate method to enhance transconductance and slew rate. In addition, two idle current controllers are employed as common source amplifiers to provide a supper class-AB structure without increasing total current consumption. The proposed structure is simulated in 0.18-$\mu$m CMOS technology at 0.5V supply with 35nW power budget. The results show a 57.9dB DC gain, 8.8kHz gain bandwidth and 38.2V/ms slew rate for the proposed amplifier.

In this paper, the clamping effect introduced by several diode-based configurations used for the implementation of the high-value resistors in quasi-floating-gate circuits is analyzed and characterized. In contrast to previous approaches where a parasitic diode is treated as a simple high-value resistor reducing the circuit complexity, in this case the analysis considers the diode behavior which leads to a clamping circuit. This clamping circuit introduces an unwanted amplitude-dependent offset voltage, which affects the performance moving the quiescent point at the quasi-floating-gate transistors. A new anti-parallel diode configuration for quasi-floating-gate applications is proposed in this work, which eliminates this unwanted offset voltage. The proposed design is validated using simulations and experimental data in a CMOS 0.35-$\mu$m technology.