Cascode Miller Compensation Research Articles

Setting‐zero analysis for multistage amplifier design

SummaryA setting‐zero analysis method is presented to facilitate the prediction of zeros in multistage amplifiers. The main objective of this method is to simplify the analysis process of such amplifiers while improving the overall performance, and the feasibility is confirmed by various examples presented in this paper. By proposing a single‐capacitor cascode Miller compensation three‐stage amplifier using setting‐zero analysis, this paper has theoretically verified that the addition of a grounding second‐stage compensation capacitor is unnecessary. Measurement results show that this amplifier consumes a current of 38 μA at a 1.2 V supply voltage, with a 103 dB open‐loop gain. When driving a 1 nF load capacitor, this design achieves 1.88 MHz gain bandwidth and 73° phase margin, with a 3.33 V/μs average slew rate and an average 1% settling time of 0.40 μs under the unity‐gain configuration.

A Three-Stage Amplifier With Cascode Miller Compensation and Buffered Asymmetric Dual Path for Driving Large Capacitive Loads

In this brief, we combine a buffered asymmetric dual-path structure with cascode Miller compensation to extend the unity-gain bandwidth of a three-stage amplifier while decreasing its power consumption. This design is implemented in a 65 nm CMOS technology with 0.0017 mm2 chip area and 6.62 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\mu }\text{W}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> power consumption. Post-simulation results achieve <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${&gt;}100$ </tex-math></inline-formula> dB DC gain, 1.20 MHz UGB, and 0.391 V/ <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\mu }\text{s}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> SR with a 1.5 nF load capacitor.

Design and Analysis of Three-Stage Amplifier for Driving pF-to-nF Capacitive Load Based on Local Q-Factor Control and Cascode Miller Compensation Techniques

This paper presents a new frequency compensation approach for three-stage amplifiers driving a pF-to-nF capacitive load. Thanks to the cascode Miller compensation, the non-dominant complex pole frequency is extended effectively, and the physical size of the compensation capacitors is also reduced. A local Q-factor control (LQC) loop is introduced to alter the Q-factor adaptively when loading capacitance CL varies significantly. This LQC loop decides how much damping current should be injected into the corresponding parasitic node to control the Q-factor of the complex-pole pair, which affects the frequency peak at the gain plot and the settling time of the proposed amplifier in the closed-loop step response. Additionally, a left-half-plane (LHP) zero is created to increase the phase margin and a feed-forward transconductance stage is paralleled to improve the slew rate (SR). Simulated in 0.13-µm CMOS technology, the amplifier is verified to handle a 4-pF-to-1.5-nF (375× drivability) capacitive load with at least 0.88-MHz gain-bandwidth (GBW) product and 42.3° phase margin (PM), while consuming 24.0-µW quiescent power at 1.0-V nominal supply voltage.

A transconductance-enhancement cascode Miller compensation for low-power multistage amplifiers

A transconductance-enhancement cascode Miller compensation technique is proposed for low supply-power, large or very large capacitive load multistage amplifiers. By using the transconductance-enhancement operational amplifiers and the local impedance attenuation network, both the gain bandwidth and setting time are thus significantly improved. The effectiveness of the method has been verified in a 0.18 μm CMOS process, the proposed three-stage amplifier has over 100 dB gain, 6.5 MHz gain-bandwidth product, and 0.83 V/μs slew rate while consuming 23 μW power from a 1.2 V supply while driving a 560 pF load.

A Cascode Miller-Compensated Three-Stage Amplifier With Local Impedance Attenuation for Optimized Complex-Pole Control

This work presents a power- and area-efficient three-stage amplifier that is able to drive a large capacitive load. Removing the inner Miller capacitor and employing cascode Miller compensation in the outer compensation loop could extend the complex-pole frequency of a three-stage amplifier, but result in a high Q-factor. A local impedance attenuation block consisting of a series RC network is proposed to control the complex poles. This block attenuates the high-frequency resistance at the second-stage output and achieves an optimized tradeoff between the frequency and the Q-factor of the complex poles. As the low-frequency resistance remains unchanged, a high dc gain is maintained. Implemented in 0.13 $\mu$ m CMOS process, the proposed design occupies an area of 0.0032 mm 2 and consumes a quiescent current of 10.5 $\mu$ A. When driving a 560 pF capacitive load, it achieves a unity-gain frequency of 3.49 MHz, an average slew rate of 0.86 V/ $\mu$ s, and an average settling time of 0.9 $\mu$ s.

A novel low-voltage operational amplifier for low-power pipelined ADCs

A novel low-voltage two-stage operational amplifier employing class-AB architecture is presented. The structure utilizes level-shifters and current mirrors to create the class-AB behavior in the first and second stages. With this structure, the transconductances of the two stages are double compared with the normal configuration without class-AB behaviors with the same current consumption. Thus power can be saved and the operation frequency can be increased. The nested cascode miller compensation and symmetric common-mode feedback circuits are used for large unit-gain bandwidth, good phase margin and stability. Simulation results show that the sample-and-hold of the 12-bit 40-Ms/s pipelined ADC using the proposed amplifier consumes only 5.8 mW from 1.2 V power supply with signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio 89.5 dB, spurious-free dynamic range 95.7 dB and total harmonic distortion –94.3 dB with Nyquist input signal frequency.