Frequency Compensation Network for Three-Stage CMOS Operational Amplifier

The rapid advancements of CMOS integrated circuits technologies lead designers to cascade structures and avoiding cascode amplifiers. As a result, frequency compensation becomes the most important issue since multi-stage amplifiers are highly potential to instability. Here in this work, two differential stages are exploited to form frequency compensation network. These stages realize four Miller loops and share each Miller capacitor in two loops simultaneously. This intensifies Miller effect to improve frequency response due to pole-zero cancellation. The proposed three stage amplifier is modeled symbolically via a transfer function (TF) while 0.18um CMOS technology is used for circuit simulation. Good agreement between theoretical calculation and simulation results shows validity and accuracy of the TF. Also ample simulations are performed to exhibit the proposed amplifier performance against parameters mismatches. The proposed three stage amplifier expresses 105 dB as DC-gain, 4.8 MHz as Gain Band Width and 72 degree as Phase Margin. The amplifier consumes 360 uW as power consumption. This performance obviously is an improvement of Nested Miller Compensation (NMC) while Figure of Merits (FoMs) are enhunced.

Automated summary

This study utilizes two differential stages to form a frequency compensation network, enhancing Miller effect to improve frequency response. The proposed three-stage amplifier demonstrates good performance in DC gain, gain bandwidth, phase margin, and power consumption.