Low-voltage low-power analog integrated circuit analysis, design and modeling

The low voltage low power integrated circuit design is becoming an important research topic because of the strong demand for mixed signal applications, such as mobile communication and other portable systems. This is especially true for deep submicron processes. The objective of this research is to study the theory and design of low voltage low power analog integrated circuits.; Some generalized approaches on the development and characterization of fully differential amplifiers have been proposed. A new methodology to derive the fully differential amplifiers from their single-ended versions has been presented. The characterization of fully differential amplifiers is performed for a generic model. Using the above generalized approaches, a practical fully differential implementation of the Nested G_m Capacitance Compensation (NGCC) Operational Amplifier (OpAmp) topology was proposed and analyzed in detail. The functionality and performance of the proposed fully differential NGCC topology have been verified by fabrications. It has been demonstrated that the Power Supply Rejection Ratio (PSRR) of fully differential NGCC amplifiers has been improved compared to the single-ended counterpart. This research has also resulted in a new amplifier topology. This new topology has the advantage of less power consumption over the NGCC topologies and is suitable for deep submicron technologies. Other low voltage filter topologies are also proposed. The proposed new bandpass and lowpass filter structures have an advantage of large Q range and can be implemented by simple CMOS inverters. Finally, a new methodology “Robust Recursive Inverse Approximation” (RRIA) in statistical integrated circuit modeling is proposed. Compared to the conventional parameter extraction methods, RRIA is robust and efficient because it utilizes the Singular Value Decomposition technique. In summary, significant contributions have been made in the analysis, design and modeling of low voltage low power analog integrated circuits.