Analysis and Implementation of a Minimum-Supply Body-Biased CMOS Differential Amplifier Cell

Abstract

A CMOS differential amplifier cell for minimum supply requirements is presented. The solution uses transistors in strong inversion and an original biasing scheme that exploits the bulk terminals of the transistor pair to accurately set the quiescent current and provide common-mode control. As a result, we avoid the use of the tail current source adopted in traditional differential stages. An implementation based on an auxiliary switched-capacitor network used in the feedback control loop is proposed and theoretically examined. Measurements on a prototype fabricated in a standard 0.35- mum technology (with threshold voltages around 0.5 V) and powered with 1.2 V show an error in the bias current of about 15% with respect to the expected value. It was found that the obtained overall performance is comparable to that of a traditional long-tailed differential pair that uses a higher supply of 1.5 V.