Design of micropower class AB transconductors: A systematic approach

Abstract

A systematic design approach to achieve micropower class AB CMOS transconductors is presented. It includes techniques to get rail-to-rail operation and continuous transconductance tuning, based on floating and Quasi-Floating Gate transistors. Application of the proposed design approach leads to a new family of high-performance power-efficient class AB CMOS transconductors. To illustrate the feasibility of this approach, 12 transconductors derived from this common framework have been designed and fabricated in a 0.5μm CMOS technology. Measurement results show THD values for 2V inputs of −56dB for a static power of 300μW and silicon area <0.07mm2.