Low-Voltage,Low-Area, nW-Power CMOS Digital-Based Biosignal Amplifier

This paper presents the operation principle and the silicon characterization of a power efficient ultra-low voltage and ultra-low area fully-differential, digital-based Operational Transconductance Amplifier (OTA), suitable for microscale biosensing applications (BioDIGOTA). Measured results in 180nm CMOS prototypes show that the proposed BioDIGOTA is able to work with a supply voltage down to 400 mV, consuming only 95 nW. Owing to its intrinsically highly-digital feature, the BioDIGOTA layout occupies only 0.022 mm(2) of total silicon area, lowering the area by 3.22x times compared to the current state of the art, while keeping reasonable system performance, such as 7.6 NEF with 1.25 mu V-RMS input referred noise over a 10 Hz bandwidth, 1.8% of THD, 62 dB of CMRR and 55 dB of PSRR.

Automated summary

This paper presents the operational principle and silicon characterization of a power efficient ultra-low voltage and ultra-low area fully-differential, digital-based Operational Transconductance Amplifier (OTA) for microscale biosensing applications (BioDIGOTA). The measured results of 180nm CMOS prototypes show that the proposed BioDIGOTA can operate with a supply voltage as low as 400 mV, consuming only 95 nW. Due to its highly digital nature, the BioDIGOTA layout occupies only 0.022 mm(2) of total silicon area, reducing the area by 3.22 times compared to the current state of the art while maintaining reasonable system performance.