Efficient four-stage frequency compensation for low-voltage amplifiers

caroline11

Abstract— This paper proposes a simple and efficient frequency compensation scheme, targeted at low-voltage amplifiers.An amplifier is correspondingly designed in 0.12-µm standard digital CMOS technology. When the supply voltage is 1V and the load is 500pF, post-layout simulation results show that the amplifier attains a gain-bandwidth product of 40.2MHz, an average slew-rate of 17.52V/µs and a current consumption of 1.4mA. The stability of the amplifier is confirmed by sufficient phase margin and fast settling behavior. The efficiency of the proposed compensation approach is also highlighted by a comparison of figures of merit (FOM) with recent designs. In addition, four new FOMs are developed to evaluate the compensation efficiency in a more accurate manner.