On the Sizing of CMOS Operational Amplifiers by Applying Many-Objective Optimization Algorithms

Abstract

In CMOS integrated circuit (IC) design, operational amplifiers are one of the most useful active devices to enhance applications in analog signal processing, signal conditioning and so on. However, due to the CMOS technology downscaling, along the very large number of design variables and their trade-offs, it results difficult to reach target specifications without the application of optimization methods. For this reason, this work shows the advantages of performing many-objective optimization and this algorithm is compared to the well-known mono- and multi-objective metaheuristics, which have demonstrated their usefulness in sizing CMOS ICs. Three CMOS operational transconductance amplifiers are the case study in this work; they were sized by applying mono-, multi- and many-objective algorithms. The well-known non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm version 3 (NSGA-III) and the many-objective metaheuristic-based on the R2 indicator (MOMBI-II) were applied to size CMOS amplifiers and their sized solutions were compared to mono- and multi-objective algorithms. The CMOS amplifiers were optimized considering five targets, associated to a figure of merit (FoM), differential gain, power consumption, common-mode rejection ratio and total silicon area. The designs were performed using UMC 180 nm CMOS technology. To show the advantage of applying many-objective optimization algorithms to size CMOS amplifiers, the amplifier with the best performance was used to design a fractional-order integrator based on OTA-C filters. A variation analysis considering the process, the voltage and temperature (PVT) and a Monte Carlo analysis were performed to verify design robustness. Finally, the OTA-based fractional-order integrator was used to design a fractional-order chaotic oscillator, showing good agreement between numerical and SPICE simulations.