0.9-V CMOS cascode amplifier with body-driven gain boosting

The body-driven variant of the gain-boosting technique is here exploited to design a CMOS transconductance amplifier with minimum supply below I V. When compared with the conventional gain-boosting technique, the proposed body-driven approach reduces the minimum supply requirement by two thresholds in a rail-to-rail amplifier exploiting two complementary input stage topologies. Simulations using a 130-nm process show that a 0.9-V power supply is adequate for a single-stage rail-to-rail amplifier providing a 56-dB gain, which is 18 dB higher than that achieved by the same architecture but using the traditional cascoding approach. The main drawbacks are that the solution requires a twin-tub process and an additional bias section. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.