A Differential-to-Single-Ended Converter Based on Enhanced Body-Driven Current Mirrors Targeting Ultra-Low-Voltage OTAs

Abstract

In this work, an ultra-low-voltage (ULV) technique to improve body-driven current mirrors is proposed. The proposed technique is employed to improve the performance of conventional differential-to-single-ended (D2S) converters which at these low voltages suffer from a low common-mode rejection ratio (CMRR). In addition, the technique aims to improve the performance of the conventional D2S also under a large signal swing and with respect to the process, voltage and temperature (PVT) variations, resulting in a very low distortion, high current mirror accuracy and robust performance. An enhanced body-driven current mirror was designed in a 130nm CMOS technology from STMicroelectronics and an exhaustive campaign of simulations was conducted to confirm the effectiveness of the strategy and the robustness of the results. The enhanced D2S was also employed to design a ULV operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) and a comparison with an OTA based on a conventional D2S was provided. The simulation results have shown that the proposed enhanced D2S allows achieving the ULV OTAs with a CMRR and a PSRR which are 18 and 9 dB higher than the ones obtained with the conventional D2S topology, respectively. Moreover, the linearity performance is also improved as shown by the THD, whose value is decreased of about 5 dB.