Tenth International Conference on VLSI Design: VLSI in Multimedia Applications
A Self-Biased High Performance Folded Cascode CMOS Op-Amp
Hyderabad, India
January 04-January 07
ISBN: 0-8186-7755-4
Cascode CMOS op-amps use a large number of external bias voltages. This results in numerous drawbacks, namely, an area and power overhead, susceptibility of the bias lines to noise and cross-talk and high sensitivity of the bias point to process variations. In this paper we present a self-biasing technique for folded cascode CMOS op-amps that uses no additional devices and no bias voltages other than the two supply rails. The resulting self-biased op-amps are free from the above mentioned drawbacks and exhibit the same performance as existing folded casode op-amps, except for a small reduction in slew rate. This is achieved by following transistor sizing constraints derived through detailed circuit analysis. The technique is applied to an existing high performance op-amp. Simulation results show that the high performance is maintained while nine bias voltages are eliminated.