2-Stage OPAMP design from scratch

[analog_fever]

two stage op amp design

I am a novice analog designer. I have some questions regarding the classic 2 stage CMOS opamp (or for that matter any analog ckt):

When one starts a design from scratch, how does one determine the device sizes to start with? Hand calculations? I tried following the procedure in Allen & Holberg for a 2-stage CMOS opamp, but found that with the calculated device sizes simulation is no where near the calculated performance.

I know most of the times designers pick an older circuit and work on making modifications to it. But how does one approach if he has to start from scratch?

 

[Old Nick]

2 stage op amp design

Choose you're minimum length to be a couple of times the minimum available in the process.
Choose the widths of, say the tail transistor, according to your current requirements.

Choose sensible overdrive voltages for your PMOS and NMOS devices, and you're pretty much there, bar compensation. A few sims later and some revisions to improve performance and you're ready to layout.

 

[henrywent]

two stage opamp design

Old Nick,
what do you mean by " choose sensible overdrive voltages ", how much do you choose in your analog design for the sensible overdrive voltages. does 0.2v in 1.8v supply voltage sensible. Any comment is welcome.

 

[Old Nick]

2 stage opamp design

Old Nick,
what do you mean by " choose sensible overdrive voltages ", how much do you choose in your analog design for the sensible overdrive voltages. does 0.2v in 1.8v supply voltage sensible. Any comment is welcome.

I've never used a 1.8V process, but you'll need a different overdrive voltage for P and N mos devices. Off the top of my head, I think I tend to use 250 mV and 350 mV ( for N and P respectively) for a 3.3 V process. So 200 mV sounds a bit high, although as I say , I've never used that process. It does deppend how aggressive you want to be with your values though.

As an exercise, choose a low Overdrive voltage and sim an amp, then choose a higher one and sim again and see the effect it has on the performance.

 

[analog_fever]

two stage operational amplifier

Oldnick thanks for the response

 

[egibson873]

mos operational amplifier design

analog_fever,

The first thing you need to decide when designing an opamp is what characteristics you want. If you want speed, you need smaller devices. If you want DC accuracy, you need bigger devices. There are other things you also have to worry about, like noise, power consumption, etc. that will also determine how big your devices need to be.

I guess the short answer to is to watch your overdrive voltages of your transistors, I usually shoot for 5-10% of the supply voltage, depending on how much speed I need to achieve and how much head room I am willing to give up.

 

[tlihu]

two stage op amp

I used to run .dc of the basic sizes of P-/N-MOS and list some of the parameters such as Gm, etc to skip hand calculation of device parameters. From there you can follow the textbook.

 

[maqadar]

Re: two stage op amp design

I am a novice analog designer. I have some questions regarding the classic 2 stage CMOS opamp (or for that matter any analog ckt):

When one starts a design from scratch, how does one determine the device sizes to start with? Hand calculations? I tried following the procedure in Allen & Holberg for a 2-stage CMOS opamp, but found that with the calculated device sizes simulation is no where near the calculated performance.

I know most of the times designers pick an older circuit and work on making modifications to it. But how does one approach if he has to start from scratch?

First of all the process parameters like vt, un, up, lamda..... do matter a lot in your design. I feel that that the parameters you use in your hand calcutions can be obtained through simulations for that particular process and then start using those values in your hand calculations. On comparasioins with the sim values the specs should be closer to your calulated ones.....