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 1 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 © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.