CMOS Inverter as Analog Circuit: An Overview

Since the CMOS technology scaling has focused on improving digital circuit, the design of conventional analog circuits has become more and more difficult. To overcome this challenge, there have been a lot of efforts to replace conventional analog circuits with digital implementations. Among those approaches, this paper gives an overview of the latest achievement on utilizing a CMOS inverter as an analog circuit. Analog designers have found that a simple resistive feedback pulls a CMOS inverter into an optimum biasing for analog operation. Recently developed applications of the resistive-feedback inverter, including CMOS inverter as amplifier, high-speed buffer, and output driver for high-speed link, are introduced and discussed in this paper.