Abstract

Wideband amplifiers are an important part of analog design, and much effort has been expended in improving them. A popular implementation of a wideband amplifier is to use one or two stages with high gain in one or both stages. An alternative to this method is presented in this work, developed for Metal Oxide Semiconductor (MOS) amplifiers. The new approach, building on previous work in bipolar technology, uses multiple differential MOS stages to achieve similar gain requirements to other wideband amplifiers. It is shown that multiple stages with low gain, if implemented according to the present design method, can lead to better gain-bandwidth product (GBW) than a few stages. As part of the design process, GBW is optimized and current draw is reduced. Derived equations are used to find the ideal device widths of each stage to improve GBW. The amplifier's current draw is reduced through increasing the widths of each successive stage according to a derived, fixed taper factor. Simulation of the resulting amplifier shows that these optimization procedures can improve GBW by 20% or more over a nonoptimized cascaded amplifier.

Degree

College and Department

Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology; Electrical and Computer Engineering

Rights

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