A 900 mV single-stage class-AB amplifier suitable for the Switched-Opamp technique is presented. To improve the slew-limited characteristics, a Dynamic Current Source (DCS) circuit which boosts the tail currents of the amplifier is proposed. The tail current of the proposed circuit is well defined and independent of technology parameters and supply variations. The tail current of the amplifier is 40 µA with zero differential voltages, while the maximum output current is nearly 900 µA. A single-loop 3rd order Σ-Δ modulator with the proposed amplifier was designed. For a 260 mV 15.625 kHz sinusoidal input signal, the simulated dynamic range of the modulator is 89 dB.

This paper proposes a low-voltage high-speed sample-and-hold (S/H) structure with excellent power efficiency. Based on the switched-opamp technique, an inverse-flip-around architecture which maximizes the feedback factor is employed in the proposed S/H. A skew-insensitive double-sampling mechanism is presented to increase the throughput by a factor of two while eliminating the timing mismatch associated with double-sampling circuits. Furthermore, a dual-input dual-output opamp is proposed to incorporate double-sampling into the switched-opamp based S/H. This opamp also removes the memory effect in double-sampling circuitry and features fast turn-on time to improve the speed performance in switched-opamp circuits. Simulation results using a 0.13-µm CMOS process model demonstrates the proposed S/H circuit has a total-harmonic-distortion of -67.3 dB up to 250 MSample/s and a 0.8 VPP input range at 0.8 V supply. The power consumption is 3.5 mW and the figure-of-merit is only 7.4 fJ/step.

This paper proposes useful circuit structures for achieving a low-voltage/low-power pipelined ADC based on switched-opamp architecture. First, a novel unity-feedback-factor sample-and-hold which manipulates the features of switched-opamp technique is presented. Second, opamp-sharing is merged into switched-opamp structure with a proposed dual-output opamp configuration. A 0.8-V, 9-bit, 10-Msample/s pipelined ADC is designed to verify the proposed circuit. Simulation results using a 0.18-µm CMOS 1P6M process demonstrate the figure-of-merit of this pipelined ADC is only 0.71 pJ/step.

A Switched-Opamp is a device in SC circuits for replacing switches with Opamps which operate like a switch. This technique can be acheived in very low voltage operation. In this paper, we present a design for a Switched-Opamp that can operate at a low supply voltage during the ON-phase and can maintain a high output impedance during the OFF-phase.