Design of PVT Tolerant Inverter Based Circuits for Low Supply Voltage

Rapid advances in the field of integrated circuit design has been advantageous from the point of view of cost and miniaturization. Although technology scaling is advantageous to digital circuits in terms of increased speed and lower power, analog circuits strongly suffer from this trend. This is becoming a crucial bottle neck in the realization of a system on chip in scaled technology merging high-density digital parts, with high performance analog interfaces. This is because scaled technologies reduce the output impedance (gain) and supply voltage which limits the dynamic range (output swing). One way to mitigate the power supply restrictions is to move to current mode circuit design rather than voltage mode designs.;This thesis focuses on designing Process Voltage and Temperature (PVT) tolerant base band circuits at lower supply voltages and in lower technologies. Inverter amplifiers are known to have better transconductance efficiency, better noise and linearity performance. But inverters are prone to PVT variations and has poor CMRR and PSRR. To circumvent the problem, we have proposed various biasing schemes for inverter like semi constant current biasing, constant current biasing and constant gm biasing. Each biasing technique has its own advantages, like semi constant current biasing allows to select different PMOS and NMOS current. This feature allows for higher inherent inverter linearity. Similarly constant current and constant gm biasing allows for reduced PVT sensitivity. The inverter based OTA achieves a measured THD of -90.6 dB, SNR of 78.7 dB, CMRR 97dB, PSRR 61 dB wile operating from a nominal power of 0.9V and at output swing of 0.9Vpp,dif f in TSMC 40nm general purpose process. Further the measured third harmonic distortion varies approximately by 11.5dB with 120° variation in temperature and 9dB with a 18% variation in supply voltage.;The linearity can be increased by increasing the loop gain and bandwidth in a negative feedback circuit or by increasing the over drive voltage in open loop architectures. However both these techniques increases the noise contribution of the circuit. There exist a trade off between noise and linearity in analog circuits. To circumvent this problem, we have introduced nonlinear cancellation techniques and noise filtering techniques. An analog-to-digital converter (ADC) driver which is capable of amplifying the continuous time signal with a gain of 8 and sample onto the input capacitor(1pF) of 1 10 bit successive approximation register (SAR) ADC is designed in TSMC 65nm general purpose process. This exploits the non linearity cancellation in current mirror and also allows for higher bandwidth operation by decoupling closed loop gain from the negative feedback loop. The noise from the out of band is filtered before sampling leading to low noise operation. The measured design operates at 100MS/s and has an OIP3 of 40dBm at the nyquist rate, noise power spectral density of 17nV/□Hz and inter modulation distortion of 65dB. The intermodulation distortion variation across 10 chips is 6dB and 4dB across a temperature variation of 120°C.;Non linearity cancellation is exploited in designing two filters, an anti alias filter and a continuously tunable channel select filter. Traditional active RC filters are based on cascade of integrators. These create multiple low impedance nodes in the circuit which results in a higher noise. We propose a real low pass filter based filter architecture rather than traditional integrator based approach. Further the entire filtering operation takes place in current domain to circumvent the power supply limitations. This also facilitates the use of tunable non linear metal oxide semiconductor capacitor (MOSCAP) as filter capacitors. We introduce techniques of self compensation to use the filter resistor and capacitor as compensation capacitor for lower power. The anti alias filter designed for 50MHz bandwidth is fabricated in IBM 65nm process achieves an IIP3 of 33dBm, while consuming 1.56mW from 1.2 V supply. The channel select filter is tunable from 34MHz to 314MHz and is fabricated in TSMC 65nm general purpose process. This filter achieves an OIP3 of 25.24 dBm at the maximum frequency while drawing 4.2mA from 1.1V supply. The measured intermodulation distortion varies by 5dB across 120°C variation in temperature and 6.5dB across a 200mV variation in power supply. Further this filter presents a high impedance node at the input and a low impedance node at the output easing system integration.