Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Current Mode Logic Active Inductor Load

Active inductor load can be designed by applying a negative voltage feedback from drain of an active current load to the gate of the active load. The feedback has a time constant that depends on the size of gate resistor and Cgs of the active load. Overall, feedback makes the load to behave like an inductor where $L=\frac{R_g C_{gs}}{g_m}$. For more details refer to page 68 of this Master's thesis. The following image is also captured from the thesis.


Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Spectre Simulation (Fundamental)

"Simulation of Analog and Mixed-Signal Circuits by Ken Kundert" slides are a quick review of the book, "The Designer's Guide to SPICE and Spectre". The book goes through the details of spice simulation and explains the trad-offs.

CMOS chopper amplifier to reduce 1/f noise

The paper reviews CMOS chopper amplifier theory and actual circuit. The theory is simple: modulate the input signal to F_chopper where 1/f noise is not significant, amplify the modulated signal. and finally demodulate and reconstruct low pass signal at the output. Also, found this work interesting: using CMOS devices in lateral bipolar mode to decrease 1/f noise (see figure 14).