High Speed Op-amp Design: Compensation and Topologies for Two and Three Stage Designs

As CMOS technology continues to evolve, the supply voltages are decreasing while at the same time the transistor threshold voltages are remaining relatively constant. Making matters worse, the inherent gain available from the nano-CMOS transistors is dropping. Traditional techniques for achieving high gain by vertically stacking (i.e. cascoding) transistors becomes less useful in sub-100nm processes. Horizontal cascading (multi-stage) must be used in order to realize op-amps in low supply voltage processes. This seminar discusses new design techniques for the realization of multi-stage op-amps. Both single-and fully-differential op-amps are presented where low power, small VDD, and high speed are important. The proposed, and experimentally verified, op-amps exhibit significant improvements in speed over the traditional op-amp designs while at the same time having smaller layout area.