A fully integrated, untrimmed CMOS instrumentation amplifier withsubmicrovolt offset

A low-noise CMOS instrumentation amplifier intended for low-frequency thermoelectric microsensor applications is presented that achieves submicrovolt offset and noise. Key to its performance is the chopper modulation technique combined with a bandpass filter and a matching on-chip oscillator. No external components or trimming are required. The achievable offset performance depends on the bandpass filter Q and the oscillator-to-bandpass filter matching accuracy. Constraints are derived for an optimum Q and a given matching accuracy. The improvement of common-mode rejection ratio (CMRR) in chopper amplifiers is discussed. The amplifier features a total gain of 77±0.3 dB and a bandwidth of approximately 600 Hz. The measured low-frequency input noise is 8.5 nV/√Hz and the input offset is 600 nV. The measured low-frequency CMRR is better than 150 dB. The circuit has been implemented in a standard 1-μm single-poly CMOS process     

A CMOS chopper amplifier

A highly sensitive CMOS chopper amplifier for low-frequency applications is described. It is realized with a second-order low-pass selective amplifier using a continuous-time filtering technique. The circuit has been integrated in a 3-/spl mu/m p-well CMOS technology. The chopper amplifier DC grain is 38 dB with a 200-Hz bandwidth. The equivalent input noise is 63 nV//spl radic/Hz and free from 1/f noise. The input offset is below 5 /spl mu/V for a tuning error less than 1%. The amplifier consumes only 34 /spl mu/W.     

A CMOS nested-chopper instrumentation amplifier with 100-nV offset

A CMOS nested-chopper instrumentation amplifier is presented with a typical offset of 100 nV. This performance is obtained by nesting an additional low-frequency chopper pair around a conventional chopper amplifier. The inner chopper pair removes the 1/f noise, while the outer chopper pair reduces the residual offset. The test chip is free from 1/f noise and has a thermal noise of 27 nV/√Hz consuming a total supply current of 200 μA     

High-temperature characterisation and analysis of leakage-current-compensated,low-power bandgap temperature sensors

This paper presents a low-power, high-performance current-feedback instrumentation amplifier (CFIA) for portable bio-potential sensing applications. Noise analysis is performed to assign an optimized current for the input stage of the amplifier. Analysis on selecting nested chopping frequencies is performed, further reducing 1/f noise and the residual offset. Enhanced power efficiency is achieved by sharing cascode branches and using a Class-AB output stage. Through these methods, a good balance between noise performance and other parameters such as output ripples and power consumption of the ripple reduction feedback loop (RRFL) is achieved. The amplifier is developed using a 1-poly 6-metal 0.18 μm CMOS process. Three gain stages with a gain-boosting input stage provide a low-frequency, open-loop gain >250 dB. When configured to a closed-loop gain of 60 dB, the amplifier achieves a noise voltage density of 18 \({\text{nV}}/\sqrt {{\text{H}}z}\) and a 1/f noise corner of 3 Hz. With a current of 75 μA and a supply voltage of 3.3 V, a CMRR of 110 dB and a PSRR of 120 dB are achieved, with an average input offset of about 6.5 μV. The amplifier achieves a state-of-art noise efficiency factor of 4.2. Practical application of the CFIA is demonstrated with an in vivo electrocardiogram detection.     

一种基于BiFET工艺的高输入阻抗运算放大器

针对CMOS运算放大器存在的输入失调电压高、噪声性能差等问题,提出了一种基于双极结型场效应晶体管(BiFET)工艺的高输入阻抗运算放大器。采用P沟道JFET差分对作为输入级,实现了pA量级的极低输入偏置电流/失调电流和nV/Hz量级的极低输入噪声电压谱密度。采用双极晶体管构成的共集-共射增益级和互补推挽输出级,实现了100 dB的开环增益、10 V/μs的输出电压转换速率和10 MHz的带宽。该运算放大器适用于对微弱模拟信号的采集和放大。     

一种用于水听器电压检测的模拟前端电路

提出了一种用于水听器电压检测的模拟前端电路,包括低噪声低失调斩波运算放大器,跨导电容(gm-C)低通滤波器,增益放大器三部分主体电路;低噪声低失调斩波运算放大器用于提取水听器前端传感器输出的微弱电压信号;gm-C低通滤波器用于滤除电压信号频率外的高频噪声和高次谐波;最后经过增益放大器放大至后级模数转换器的输入电压范围,输出数字码流;芯片采用台积电(TSMC)0.18μm单层多晶硅六层金属(1P6M)CMOS工艺实现。测试结果表明,在电源电压1.8 V,输入信号25 kHz和200 kHz时钟频率下,斩波运放输入等效失调电压小于110μV;整体电路输出信号动态范围达到80 dB,功耗5.1 mW,满足水听器的检测要求。     

一种适用于传感器信号检测的斩波运算放大器

提出一种适合传感器微弱信号检测应用的全差分低噪声、低失调斩波运算放大器。采用两级折叠共源共栅运放结构,基于斩波稳定及动态元件匹配技术,通过在运放低阻节点的电流通路上添加斩波开关的设计方式,增加了运放的输入信号带宽和输出电压摆幅。芯片采用TSMC 0.18μm 1P6MCMOS工艺实现。测试结果表明,在1.8V电源电压,25kHz输入信号和300kHz斩波频率下,斩波运放输入等效失调电压小于120μV,在10Hz～1kHz之间,输入等效噪声为5nV/Hz^1/2,最高开环增益为84dB,单位增益带宽为4MHz。     

Integrated CMOS amplifier for ENG signal recording

The development and in vivo test of a fully integrated differential CMOS amplifier, implemented with standard 0.7-microm CMOS technology (one poly, two metals, self aligned twin-well CMOS process) intended to record extracellular neural signals is described. In order to minimize the flicker noise generated by the CMOS circuitry, a chopper technique has been chosen. The fabricated amplifier has a gain of 74 dB, a bandwidth of 3 kHz, an input noise of 6.6 nV/(Hz)0.5, a power dissipation of 1.3 mW, and the active area is 2.7 mm2. An ac coupling has been used to adapt the electrode to the amplifier circuitry for the in vivo testing. Compound muscle action potentials, motor unit action potentials, and compound nerve action potentials have been recorded in acute experiments with rats, in order to validate the amplifier.     

A high dynamic range ultralow-current-mode amplifier with pico-ampere sensitivity for biosensor applications

A novel ultralow-current-mode amplifier (ULCA) serving for on-chip biosensor signal pre-amplification in the integrated biosensing system (IBS) has been presented and verified in SMIC 0.18 μm CMOS technology by elaborately considering gain, bandwidth, noise, offset, and mismatch. The proposed ULCA solved the noise, bandwidth, and current headroom dilemma in the reported works, and can completely satisfy the specifications of IBS. It provides a current gain of 20 dB, 3 dB bandwidth of 7.03 kHz and input dynamic range of 20 bit, with only 1 nA of DC quiescent current, while the input offset current and noise current are less than 16.0 pA and 4.67 pArms, respectively.     

嵌套式斩波运放的分析与设计

针对传统的斩波运放具有大残余失调的特点,设计了一个嵌套式斩波运放。基于SMIC0.18μm工艺,通过Spectre仿真工具进行验证与仿真,运放的开环增益达到78.3dB,共模抑制比达到112dB。在斩波频率fchophigh=10kHz、fchoplow=500Hz的条件下,通过使用非匹配斩波开关,分别对单斩波和嵌套式斩波运放进行仿真。结果表明,嵌套式斩波技术能有效减小残余失调的影响。适用于带宽较低的微弱信号检测与处理电路,如传感器前端读出电路和音频信号放大电路等。     

A compact low noise operational amplifier for a 1.2 μm digitalCMOS technology

A compact low noise operational amplifier using lateral p-n-p bipolar transistors in the input stage has been fabricated in a standard 1.2 μm digital n-well CMOS process. Like their n-p-n counterparts in p-well processes, these lateral p-n-p transistors exhibit low 1/f noise and good lateral β. The fabricated op amp has an area of only 0.211 mm² with E_n=3.2 nV/√(Hz), I_n=0.73 pA/√(Hz), E_n and I_n 1/f noise corner frequencies less than 100 Hz, a -3 dB bandwidth greater than 10 MHz with a closed loop gain of 20.8 dB, a minimum PSRR (DC) of 68 dB, a CMRR (DC) of 100 dB, a minimum output slew rate of 39 V/μs, and a quiescent current of 2.1 mA at supply voltages of ±2.5 V. The operational amplifier drives a 1 kΩ resistive load to 1 V peak-to-peak at 10 MHz and has been used as a versatile building block for mixed-signal IC designs     

2.5Gb/s CMOS低噪声有源电感反馈跨阻放大器

分析各种结构前置放大器性能的基础上,给出了一个应用于2.5 Gbit/s光纤通信系统的,基于CMOS工艺的共栅结构跨阻放大器。为了减小输入等效噪声电流和提高带宽,采用了有源反馈和有源电感代替传统结构中的电阻反馈。测试结果表明,该电路具有61.8 dB的跨阻增益,2.01 GHz的带宽,输入等效噪声电流为9.5 pA/Hz～(1/2),核心电路功耗仅为3.02 mW。     

A 1.2-V RF front-end with on-chip VCO for PCS 1900 direct conversion receiver in 0.13-/spl mu/m CMOS

In this paper, a 1.2-V RF front-end realized for the personal communications services (PCS) direct conversion receiver is presented. The RF front-end comprises a low-noise amplifier (LNA), quadrature mixers, and active RC low-pass filters with gain control. Quadrature local oscillator (LO) signals are generated on chip by a double-frequency voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) and frequency divider. A current-mode interface between the downconversion mixer output and analog baseband input together with a dynamic matching technique simultaneously improves the mixer linearity, allows the reduction of flicker noise due to the mixer switches, and minimizes the noise contribution of the analog baseband. The dynamic matching technique is employed to suppress the flicker noise of the common-mode feedback (CMFB) circuit utilized at the mixer output, which otherwise would dominate the low-frequency noise of the mixer. Various low-voltage circuit techniques are employed to enhance both the mixer second- and third-order linearity, and to lower the flicker noise. The RF front-end is fabricated in a 0.13-/spl mu/m CMOS process utilizing only standard process options. The RF front-end achieves a voltage gain of 50 dB, noise figure of 3.9 dB when integrated from 100 Hz to 135 kHz, IIP3 of -9 dBm, and at least IIP2 of +30dBm without calibration. The 4-GHz VCO meets the PCS 1900 phase noise specifications and has a phase noise of -132dBc/Hz at 3-MHz offset.     

A clocked high-pass-filter-based offset cancellation technique for high-gain biomedical amplifiers

In this article, a simple offset cancellation technique based on a clocked high-pass filter with extremely low output offset is presented. The configuration uses the on-resistance of a complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) transmission gate (X-gate) and tunes the lower 3-dB cut-off frequency with a matched pair of floating capacitors. The results compare favourably with the more complex auto-zeroing and chopper stabilisation techniques of offset cancellation in terms of power dissipation, component count and bandwidth, while reporting inferior output noise performance. The design is suitable for use in biomedical amplifier systems for applications such as ENG-recording. The system is simulated in Spectre Cadence 5.1.41 using 0.6 μm CMOS technology and the total block gain is ～83.0 dB while the phase error is <5°. The power consumption is 10.2 mW and the output offset obtained for an input monotone signal of 5 μVpp is 1.28 μV. The input-referred root mean square noise voltage between 1 and 5 kHz is 26.32 nV/√Hz.     

A CMOS readout amplifier for instrumentation applications

An integrated readout amplifier for instrumentation applications in smart sensor systems is presented. A fully integrated CMOS version of such an amplifier has been developed using switched-capacitor techniques. The amplifier system provides differential input capability, programmable amplification, clock generation, and low-pass filtering on the chip. The output signal is continuous in time and the system can be used without any of the special precautions necessary for sampled-data circuits. Emphasis was put on high PSRR (-63 dB at DC), low noise (10-μV_rms input equivalent wideband noise) and offset, low harmonic distortion, and small amplification error (<0.06% at 4 V_pp). To cover a large field of applications, only slightly different realizations can be used for capacitive sensors as well as for resistive sensor bridges     

A 0.6-V Low Power UWB CMOS LNA

This paper presents the design of a low-power ultra-wideband low noise amplifier in 0.18-mum CMOS technology. The inductive degeneration is applied to the conventional distributed amplifier design to reduce the broadband noise figure under low power operation condition. A common-source amplifier is cascaded to the distributed amplifier to improve the gain at high frequency and extend the bandwidth. Operated at 0.6V, the integrated UWB CMOS LNA consumes 7mW. The measured gain of the LNA is 10dB with the bandwidth from 2.7 to 9.1GHz. The input and output return loss is more than 10dB. The noise figure of the LNA varies from 3.8 to 6.9dB, with the average noise figure of 4.65dB. The low power consumption of this work leads to the excellent figure of gain-bandwidth product (GBP) per milliwatt     

High-performance RF mixer and operational amplifier BiCMOS circuits using parasitic vertical bipolar transistor in CMOS technology

The electrical characteristics of the parasitic vertical NPN (V-NPN) BJT available in deep n-well 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS technology are presented. It has about 20 of current gain, 7 V of collector-emitter breakdown voltage, 20 V of collector-base breakdown voltage, 40 V of Early voltage, about 2 GHz of cutoff frequency, and about 4 GHz of maximum oscillation frequency at room temperature. The corner frequency of 1/f noise is lower than 4 kHz at 0.5 mA of collector current. The double-balanced RF mixer using V-NPN shows almost free 1/f noise as well as an order of magnitude smaller dc offset compared with CMOS circuit and 12 dB flat gain almost up to the cutoff frequency. The V-NPN operational amplifier for baseband analog circuits has higher voltage gain and better input noise and input offset performance than the CMOS ones at the identical current. These circuits using V-NPN provide the possibility of high-performance direct conversion receiver implementation in CMOS technology.     

Low-noise amplifier in 0.12 /spl mu/m standard CMOS technology for K-band

A K-band CMOS low-noise amplifier with a noise figure of 4.26 dB and a peak gain of 18.86 dB is presented. The low-noise amplifier has a peak gain frequency of 20.3 GHz and an input referred 1 dB compression point of -16 dBm. These are believed to be the lowest noise figure and highest gain values reported to date at these frequencies in a standard CMOS technology.     

Low power DDA-based instrumentation amplifier for neural recording applications in 65 nm CMOS

The low power instrumentation amplifier (IA) presented in this paper has been designed to be the front-end of an integrated neural recording system, in which common-mode rejection ratio (CMRR), input referred noise and power consumption are critical requirements. The proposed IA topology exploits a differential-difference amplifier (DDA) whose differential output current drives a fully differential, high-resistance, transimpedance stage, with an embedded common-mode feedback loop to increase the CMRR. This stage is followed by a differential-to-single-ended output amplifier. Low-power operation has been achieved by exploiting sub-threshold operation of MOS transistors and adopting a supply voltage of 1 V. Simulation results in a commercial 65 nm CMOS technology show a 1 Hz to 5 kHz bandwidth, a CMRR higher than 120 dB, an input referred noise of 8.1 μVrms and a power consumption of 1.12 μW.     

Dual excitation scheme for direct suppression of residual signal in fibre-optic magnetometers

A novel dual-excitation scheme capable of suppressing the residual signal responsible for up-converting low-frequency noise in a fibre-optic magnetometer is reported. This scheme provides a magnetic carrier with spatially varying strength and can reduce both the up-converted interferometer noise and the up-converted transducer noise. With a 5 cm long amorphous wire transducer, 30 dB of residual signal suppression resulting in a signal-to-noise ratio improvement of 25 dB has been obtained for a magnetic signal at 1 Hz when the response using dual excitation is compared with that using single excitation.<>