A compact power-efficient 0.5 V fully differential difference amplifier

Abstract

This brief presents a novel compact CMOS Fully Differential Difference Amplifier (FDDA) structure suitable for extremely low-voltage low-power applications. Unlike the conventional FB-DDAs that employ two differential pairs, the proposed structure employs one differential pair of multiple-input bulk-driven MOS transistor (MI-BD MOST) that results in reduced count of current branches and, consequently, of power consumption. The proposed FDDA has the simplest CMOS structure presented in the literature so far. Furthermore, while the voltage supply is 0.5 V and the power consumption is 246.6 nW the circuit enjoys rail-to-rail input common mode range (ICMR), high common mode rejection ratio (CMRR) of 100.3 dB @ DC, power supply rejection ratio (PSRR) of 127.8 dB@ DC, voltage gain of 61.4 dB and gain bandwidth product of 6.98 kHz for 30 pF capacitive load. The total harmonic distortion (THD) is less than 0.08% for 500 mV/1 kHz input sine wave signal. The circuit was designed and simulated in Cadence/Spectre environment using 0.18 µm CMOS process from TSMC.