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Nath2021 Article DesignOfLowPowerPreamplifierIC
Nath2021 Article DesignOfLowPowerPreamplifierIC
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Design of low power preamplifier IC for cochlear implant using split folded
cascode technique
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TECHNICAL PAPER
Abstract
According to the WHO (World Health Organization) report, out of 360 million people, i.e. over 5% of world population,
have a disabling hearing loss. Designing a low-cost cochlear implant for hearing aid device is therefore of great impor-
tance. The overall cochlear system consists of several blocks, namely, the microphone for sensing the sound waves, the
preamplifier for boosting the signal level and the signal processing unit to generate electrical pulses for the electrode to
stimulate the auditory nerve. In this paper, we address the design of the High-gain Low Power Preamplifier block for
cochlear implants, as it plays a crucial role for the incoming signal to be further processed. In particular, a new technique
named Split Folded Cascode (SFC) for designing the Operational Transconductance Amplifier (OTA) is proposed. This
arrangement enhances the performance of normal cascode solutions. This technique splits the current in two different
branches and increases the overall transconductance by 1.414 times. Simulations and post layout analysis have been carried
out for the proposed preamplifier in Cadence Virtuoso using Semi-Conductor Laboratory (SCL) 180 nm technology
parameters. In this proposed design a mid-band gain of 43.7 dB, bandwidth of 18–20 kHz and noise 473.47 nV/HHz at
4 kHz are obtained.
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feedback and Cin, Cf are used to control the gain. The 1.2 Split folded cascode (SFC) OTA design
topology is slightly modified here. Instead of passive single
resistor, Mf1 and Mf2 are used as pseudo-resistors, realised For designing the 1st stage of the proposed preamplifier,
in diode connected mode that aids to get better flexibility in Folded Cascode OTA topology has been used as it allows
controlling the cut-off frequency. The series capacitance reduced supply margins and is a self-compensating one
along with the input source are used to realise the Micro- (Razavi 2002). The design uses a normal folded cascode
phone (Ryoo et al. 2016). Vref is used as biasing voltage. structure with split input transistor and the folded transistor
The mid band gain is controlled by the ratio of Cin/Cf, set to the same aspect ratio. The idea of doing this is to split
which is approximately found to be 43.5 dB with input the current in two different branches and to increase the
capacitance Cin= 20 pF and Cf = 120 fF. The Cin is actually overall transconductance of the amplifier. This arrange-
used as AC coupling capacitor to cancel the DC offset and ment helps to use low bias current to get sufficient gain,
Cf is the feedback capacitance. The block diagram of the which results in low power consumption. In Fig. 4 the split
proposed system is shown in Fig. 2. Within the schematic folded cascode is shown. The arrangement and mathe-
in Fig. 3, Cp models the parasitic gate capacitances at the matical proof are stated below. The proposed schematic
input, while Gm and Ro are used to model the OTA circuit diagram is shown in Fig. 5. Here the input transistor
transconductance and output impedance. Moreover, Rp is M1a, M1b, M2a, M2b are split, i.e. instead of one, a pair of
used to realize the overall resistance offered by the series transistors are connected, similarly to complement the
pseudo-resistors and CL is the load capacitance, the com- splitting, a pair of folded transistors is also connected as
bination of which controls the cut-off frequency of the M5a, M5b, M6a, and M6b. As a result of splitting with
overall amplifier. From the block diagram, the overall lower aspect ratio, the same performance is achieved,
transfer function is given by Eq. (1). which in turn helps in reducing the area as well as the
vout ðsÞ C in sRP CL parasitic resistance and capacitance in the backend design.
H ðsÞ ¼ ¼ ð1Þ As it can be seen, source degenerated current sources are
vin ðsÞ C f 1 þ sRP CL
employed as in Laskar et al. (2018), rather than normal
The mid-band gain of the amplifier is given by Eq. (2) current sources, which provides a significant improvement
Cin in noise performance as compared to a conventional Folded
Av ¼ ð2Þ Cascode OTA. Resistance R2, R3, R4, R5 are connected to
Cf
scale the current. They are configured to draw less current
The input-referred noise of the gain stage of the OTA through, therefore leading to lower noise (Laskar et al.
can be related to the input-referred noise of the overall 2018).
amplifier, as it is shown in Eq. (3) Here the cascode current mirror load is used instead of
normal current mirror to enhance the gain. One extra
C in þ Cf þ C p;in 2
¼ ð3Þ transistor is being used, i.e. M13, to give high swing out-
vn,amp2 C in vn2
put, as we know folded cascode has low output swing
where, vn;amp 2 is the input-referred noise of the amplifier (Laskar et al. 2018). In Table 1 all the design parameters
and vn 2 is the input referred noise of the OTA. are listed after calculation.
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Under the assumption of neglecting the body effect, the The output resistance is the parallel combination of the
complete small signal analysis is performed. This is done current mirror load with parallel combination of input
because the body terminal of the PMOS is connected transistor and the source degeneration resistor. Equa-
directly to the positive terminal of the power supply and the tion (12) shown below is the total output resistance
body of the NMOS is connected directly to the ground. The
Rout ¼ ðgm8 r o8 r o10 Þ k ð gm6a r o6a r o1a k ðr o3b k R4 Þ
small signal diagram of the proposed circuit is shown
k ð gm6b r o6b r o1b k ðr o4b k R5 ÞÞÞ ð12Þ
below in Fig. 6 considering the half circuit method.
Small signal transconductance.
The small signal transconductance is an important 1.5 Small signal gain
parameter to be determined. The overall transconductance
is calculated from the Fig. 6 shown below. The small signal gain of the proposed preamplifier is given
Referring to the schematic in Fig. 6, by the product of the obtained transconductance and the
R8 ¼ ðððgm3b r 03b Þ k R4 Þ k r 01a Þ ð4Þ output resistance calculated. Equation (13) shown below
gives the gain of the amplifier:
R9 ¼ gm6a r 06a ð5Þ
Av ¼ Gm Rout
R6 ¼ ðððgm4b r 04b Þ k R5 Þ k r 01b Þ ð6Þ
2gm1a
R7 ¼ gm6b r 06b ð7Þ Av ¼ ðgm8 r o8 r o10 Þ
1 þ ðððg gr03b
m6a r 06a
ÞkR Þkr Þ
m3b 4 01a
I out ¼ I out1 þ I out2 ð8Þ k ð gm6a r o6a r o1a k ðr o3b k R4 Þ k ð gm6b r o6b r o1b
k ðr o4b k R5 ÞÞÞ
Moreover, I out1 ¼ I out2 , R6 ¼ R8 andR9 ¼ R7 : Since all
the aspect ratios of the transistor are the same, the resis- ð13Þ
tance value of R4 and R5 are the same, as well. Hence from
Eq. (8)
1.6 Noise analysis
I out ¼ 2I out1 ¼ 2I out2 ð9Þ
The main source of noise, as shown in Fig. 2, is given by
After solving the small signal model, the overall
the contribution by all non-cascode transistors, as the
transconductance Gm can be written as:
cascode transistors do not contribute to noise (Razavi
2gm1a gm1a gm1b 2002). The total noise analysis is done by considering half
Gm ¼ ¼ ð10Þ
1 þ RR98 1 þ RR98 1 þ RR76 circuit, as the circuit is symmetric. Then the final expres-
sion of noise is obtained by multiplying the half circuit
Replacing the values of R9, and R8 in Eq. (10)
noise by two. Therefore, the main contributing component
2gm1a for noise is the differential pair input transistors M1a, M1b,
Gm ¼ ð11Þ
1 þ ðððg rg03b
m6a r 06a
ÞkR4 Þkr01a Þ the resistors R4 and R5, the current mirror transistors M9
m3b
and M10, and the high swing active resistor M13. The
overall noise of the amplifier would then be the integration
of the OTA noise over the amplifier noise bandwidth. The
total noise for any circuit is given by the contribution of
thermal noise, which is due to random motion of charge
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carriers (Razavi 2002), and flicker noise due to trapping of 2 Results and discussions
charge carriers at the gate. The flicker noise is the dominant
noise in case of low frequencies. The thermal noise is For validating the performance of the proposed preampli-
shown in Eq. (14) and the flicker noise is shown in fier, simulations have been carried out in Cadence Virtuoso
Eq. (13). The overall input referred noise for the proposed using SCL 180 nm technology parameters, and setting the
OTA is shown in Eq. (17). design parameters as previously shown in Table 1. The
In the equations below, post-layout analysis of the design was performed and
gm1 ¼ gm1a¼ gm1b ; 2gm1 ¼ gm1a þ gm1b results indicate very low deviation as compared to pre-
Similarly, gm2 ¼ gm2a¼ gm2b ; 2gm2 ¼ gm2a þ gm2b ; layout, which further validates the consistency of the per-
gm3 ¼ gm3a¼ gm3b ; 2gm3 ¼ gm3a þ gm3b formance of the proposed preamplifier for the said appli-
gm4 ¼ gm4a¼ gm4b ; 2gm4 ¼ gm4a þ gm4b cation. It can be observed that the proposed preamplifier
qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi shows a very good mid-band gain of around 43.7 dB at the
Moreover, as known: gm ¼ 2ln C ox WL I D -3 dB cut-off frequencies of 18 Hz (lower) and 20 kHz
Bearing this in mind, the mentioned equations are for- (upper) (see Fig. 7). It can be inferred that at low fre-
mulated as follows: quencies the flicker noise significantly dominates the noise,
2 4gm1 4gm2 4gm3 4gm4 2gm13 which decreases with the increase in frequency. After the
I n;Thermal ¼ 4KT þ þ þ þ
3 3 3 3 3 corner frequency, there is a flat frequency response indi-
4gm9 1 1 1 1 cating that the noise is dominated by thermal noise (see
þ þ þ þ þ Þð14Þ Fig. 8). Finally, the power dissipation plot in Fig. 9 shows
3 R2 R3 R 4 R5
ð14Þ a very low deviation in power dissipation from 4.6 lW to
4.63 lW after the post-layout analysis has been performed,
K p 2gm1 2 2gm2 2 2K N gm3 2 gm13 2 2gm9 2 thereby indicating the negligible impact of parasitic
I 2n;Flicker ¼ þ þ þ þ ð15Þ
Cox f W 1 L1 W 2 L2 K p W 3 L3 W 13 L13 W 9 L9
capacitances on the overall load of the amplifier. The
ð15Þ results are listed in Table 2 showing some deviation,
however limited to less than 2% and the results are in close
V 2n;Total ¼ ðI 2n;Thermal þ I 2n;Flicker Þ Rout 2
ð16Þ
agreement, thereby validating the consistency in the per-
formance of the proposed amplifier. The comparative
1 4gm1 4gm2 4gm3 4gm4 2gm13 4gm9 1 1 1 1
V 2n;TotalInputRefered ¼ ½4KT þ þ þ þ þ þ þ þ þ
Gm 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 R2 R3 R4 R 5
K p 2gm1 2 2gm2 2 2K N gm3 2 gm13 2 2gm9 2
þ þ þ þ þ ð17Þ
Cox f W 1 L1 W 2 L2 K p W 3 L3 W 13 L13 W 9 L9
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Fig. 11 Tape-out of
preamplifier
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