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Characterization of Low Power CMOS Class-A Voltage Followers in 0.5m Technology

AbstractThis paper describes comparative analysis of four different class A voltage followers. All the described follow ers are characterized for voltage gain, input impedance, output impedance, bandw idth, total harmonic distortion and pow er dissipationn. They are characterized by simulating the designs using 0.5m AMI technology using eldo spice in mentor grapics. The results are used to compare the performance of above follow ers at 3.3V pow er supply and 1pF load. Finally the comparison is tabulated in table form. For the basic source f ollow er and modified super source follow er voltage gain is 0.93 but modified super source follow er show s 6.5 and bandw idth 198MHz w ith pow er dissipation of 26.7Watt. Index Terms Flipped Voltage Follow er, Harmonic distortion, Shunt feedback, Voltage gain.

1 INTRODUCTION

S the CMOS process entering the nano meter scale analog circuit will need to operate in lower and lower supply voltage. This trend is mainly because of the need of the low power and low voltage requirement in the consumer electronics. While, scaling down size technology supply voltage do not scale linearly the VT. And VDsat is not scaled down linearly either. These facts serious limit the only voltage swing in low voltage supply. Many techniques, such as feedback, threshold independent, pseudo differential, Symmetrical Push pull, body driven, class A and Class AB have been proposed in literatures to reduce the power supply requirement and still retain acceptable performance. In order to meet the critical power and supply voltage requirements of the portable devices, designing some new cells to satisfy the technique developing trend should be primarily considered by pre-

Fig.1 Voltage follower as Impedance matching anlog cell

sent analog circuit designers. Voltage Follower is a basic analog cell in which output voltage follows the input voltage and it is also known as unity gain amplifiers. In normal high gain amplifiers, the output impedance is rather high and not suitable for driving low resistive or large capacitive load. In order to drive large capacitive

loads and low resistive load with high speed and attain high signal-to-noise ratios, analog buffers must provide an output current and voltage swing range which is as high as possible. As shown in Figure 1 voltage follower is inserted between a driving stage and a high load (i.e. a low resistance) presents an infinite resistance (low load) to the driving stage.Voltage Follower mainly used as impedance matching circuit and Level shifter. The Voltage follower is one of the most important basic cells in analog circuit design. Presently most system require follower to have capability to drive low resistance loads, while at the same time can handle large output voltage swing and obtained low harmonic distortion. In this paper a comparison among class-A voltage followers is made. Each topology overcomes the limitation present in previous topologies and each topology is characterised for voltage swing, harmonic distortion, input impedance, bandwidth, output resistance and power dissipation. The paper is organised as following. Section 2; introduce different class-A topologies. In section 3, simulation results are listed and comparison among source follower, flipped voltage follower, super source follower is made and paper concludes in section 4.

2 VOLTAGE FOLLOWER
2.1 Basic Source Follower The traditional voltage follower is simple source follower and it is easy to construct as shown in Figure 1. In electronics, a common-drain amplifier, also known as a source follower, is one of three basic single-stage field effect transistor (FET) amplifier topologies, typically used as a voltage buffer. In this circuit the gate terminal of the transistor serves as the input, the source is the output, and the drain is common to both (input and output), hence its name.

dramatically. 2.2 Flipped Voltage Follower The solution of above limitation is solved in Flipped voltage follower also known as voltage follower with shunt feedback [6]. As shown in Figure 3 the current source Ib is placed at drain of transistor M1 so the current through M1 remain constant independent of the output current. So VgsM1 is held constant independent from the change in input. This give a more precise copy of the voltage than a traditional source follower can provide. It is able to source much more current than a simple source follower. It is able to source a large amount of current, but its sinking capability is limited by the biasing current source Ib. The large sourcing capability is due to the low impedance at the output node, which is approximately

Fig. 2 Basic Source Fllower

This circuit is used to transform impedances. For example, the Thvenin resistance of a combination of a voltage follower driven by a voltage source with high Thvenin resistance is reduced to only the output resistance of the voltage follower, a small resistance. That resistance reduction makes the combination a more ideal voltage source. From small signal analysis from [1], Voltage Gain: Av= gm1 Ro For unity gain output resistance Ro=1/ gm1 Where, (1) (2)

Ro

1 g m1 g m 2 ro1

(3)

Where, gm1 and ro1 are the transconductance and output resistance of M1. Second limitation is that the output headroom of flipped voltage follower is decreased to Vgs2VDsat which is less then source follower.

g m1 2 I D1 2 =W/L Cox and ID Vgs -VTh for VDS Vgs -VTh 2

There are several limitations in this topology. Current through transistor M1 is heavily depending on output current. So the Vgs of M1 is signal dependent and distortion is produced at output. Also its sourcing capability is limited by the biasing current source Ib. And the output resistance of source follower is 1/gm1 and it is several K. The solution is to increase transco nductance gm, which means large bias current and large W/L dimension. As a result power and area increase

Fig. 4 Super Source Follower

Fig. 3 Flipped Voltage Follower

2.3 Super Source Follower To minimize the area and power dissipation required to reach a given output resistance in simple Source Follower, the super source follower configuration shown in Figure 4; here the circuit uses the negative feedback to reduce the output resistance [3]. From a qualitative standpoint, when the input voltage is constant and the output voltage increases, the magnitude of the drain current of M1 also increases, in turn increasing the gate-source voltage of M2. As a result, the drain current of M2 increases, reducing the output resistance by increasing the total current that flows into the output node under these conditions. From a dc standpoint, the bias current in M2 is the difference between Ib1 and Ib2; therefore, Ib2 > Ib1 is required for proper operation. Here the output resistance is

Ro

1 g g r

(4)

The output resistance of basic source follower is reduced by factor gm2ro1. For the Super source follower voltage headroom around output node is VDD- VGS -2VDsat . So a trade-off between output swing and minimum supply voltage should be made. For low supply voltages the voltage swing is Low. The main potential problem with the super source follower configuration is that the negative feedback loop through M2 may not be stable in all cases, especially when driving a capacitive load. Because of the big voltage variation at drain node of input transistor in previous two topologies which introduces serious channel length modulation. 2.3 Modified Super Source Follower So improvement is made in Super Source Follower as shown in Figure 5 by adding extra intermediate stage to

Also in this VDD-3VDsat which is also bigger than flipped voltage follower and super source Follower. And because of this low output impedance this kind of voltage follower can drive low output resistance load. The linearity performance is also improved because of this low impedance node. The drain node of input transistor in Figure 5 is low resistance so small voltage variation is appeared in this node TABLE 1 TRANSISTORS SIZE

and channel length modulation in M1 is eliminated. Table 2 shows comparison that summarizes characteristics of voltage followers.

3 SIMULATION

RESULTS

All the voltage follower topologies have been simulated with eldo spice in AMI 0.5m process. All the followers are simulated with the set up of VDD= 3.3V andVSS=0V. For the transient analysis sinusoidal Vin with 0.1V peak to peak magnitude and 1MHz signal is applied.Almost all W/L of transistors are same and bias currents are also same as shown in Table 1.
Fig. 5 Modified Super Source Follower

replace the VGS voltage drop in the critical path around output node and minimize the voltage headroom [5]. And because of this extra intermediate stage output resistance is gm3ro3 time smaller then the super source follower. Here M3, a current source and a current sink make up of a folded cascade stage which further decreases the output impedance to a smaller value. According to KCL and KVL the output resistance is approximately given by

Figure 6 shows the Frequency response, Figure 7 is plot of Vout versus Vin which shows offset in each voltage follower and Figure 8 shows output impedance of above four topologies. As explained the flipped voltage follower has less voltage swing compared to source follower. A little modification in super source follower result in to very low output impedance built by the folded cascade feedback loop and also it improves the linearity as shown in Fig. 6.

Ro

1 g m1 g m 2 ro1 g m3ro3

(5)

TABLE 2 SIMULATION RESULTS OF THE OVERALL PERFORMANCE OF THE CLASS A V OLTAGE FOLLOWER CIRCUIT OF FIGUER 2 TO 5

4 CONCLUSION
In this paper characteristic comparison among source follower, flipped voltage follower, super source follower and modified super source follower is made. Each topology shows some limitation and it is compensated by next topology. For the basic source follower output resistance is of order of 5K, which is very high. So it is not suitable for driving low impedance load. In flipped voltage follower output impedance is lower down to 2.86K, but at the same time its voltage gain r educe to 0.83. Where as modified super source followers shows very low output resistance of order of 6.5 a nd 0.93

Fig. 7 Offset in Class-A Voltage Followers

Fig. 8 Frequency response of Class-A Voltage Followers Fig. 6 Output Impedance of Class-A Voltage Followers

voltages gain which is almost same as the basic source fo llower. At the same time bandwidth is 198MHz. So, Modified super source follower is useful for driving low resistive and high capacitive load with low total harmonic distortion.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors wish to thank Nirma university for providing working environment and also thank full to the colleague of nirma university.

REFERENCES
[1] [2] [3] P.E. Allen and D.R. Holberg, CMOS analog circuit design, Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 2002. F. Maloberti, Analog Design for CMOS VLSI Systems, Kluwer Academic/Plenum press, 2003. P.R. Gray, P.J. Hurst, S. H. Lewls, R.G. Meyer, Analysis and design of Analog Integrated Circuits, JOHN WlLEY & SONS, 4th ed.,2001.. R.J. Baker, H. W. Li, D.E. Boyce, CMOS Circuit Design, Layout and Simulation, IEEE Press Series on Microelectronics Sy stems, 2005. Y. Kong, S. Xu, H. Yang, An Ultra Low Output Resistance and Wide Swing Voltage Follower, ICCCAS 2007, pp. 1007 - 1010, July 2007.

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