Feed-forward techniques are explored for the design of high-frequency Operational
Transconductance Amplifiers (OTAs). For single-stage amplifiers, a recycling folded-cascode OTA presents twice
the GBW (197.2 MHz versus 106.3 MHz) and more than twice the slew rate (231.1 V/s versus 99.3 V/s) as a conventional folded cascode OTA for the same load, power consumption, and transistor dimensions. It is demonstrated that the efficiency of the recycling folded-cascode is equivalent to that of a telescopic OTA. As for multistage amplifiers, a No-Capacitor Feed-Forward (NCFF) compensation scheme which uses a high-frequency pole-zero doublet to obtain
greater than 90 dB DC gain, GBW of 325 MHz and better than phase margin is discussed. The settling-time- of the NCFF topology can be faster than that of OTAs with Miller compensation. Experimental results for the recycling folded-cascode OTA fabricated in TSMC 0.18 m CMOS, and results of the NCFF demonstrate the efficiency and feasibility of the feed-forward schemes.
Recent Advances on the Design of High-Gain Wideband Operational Transconductance Amplifiers
