Miscellaneous active electrical nonlinear devices – circuits – and – Specific identifiable device – circuit – or system – With specific source of supply or bias voltage
Patent
1998-01-23
2000-11-14
Kim, Jung Ho
Miscellaneous active electrical nonlinear devices, circuits, and
Specific identifiable device, circuit, or system
With specific source of supply or bias voltage
327538, G05F 302
Patent
active
061475505
ABSTRACT:
Methods and circuits for biasing a transconducting cell to operate in a subthreshold state so as to have a desired high transconductance, and systems including a master cell for generating a regulated bias voltage and one or more transconducting slave cells biased in subthreshold by the bias voltage. An example of such system is an inverting voltage amplifier (offering low power consumption, low noise, good stability, and high gain). The bias voltage is generated to be independent of process and environmental variations by servoing an unregulated supply voltage, and preferably has lower magnitude relative to ground than the supply voltage. Preferably, the master cell includes transistors in which a constant current density is maintained, and this current density is replicated in each slave cell biased by the master cell. Preferably, the master cell is configured to regulate the bias voltage precisely over a wide range of load currents from the slave cells, thus eliminating the need for a current boosting voltage follower between the master cell and each slave cell. The slave cell can comprise multiple transconducting stages (each biased in subthreshold), an integrator having multiple inverter stages (and at least one feedback stage providing displacement current to one of the stages), cascoded transistor pairs, or an NMOS transistor and PMOS transistor biased in subthreshold with gate potentials offset by different amounts above and below an input voltage.
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Kim Jung Ho
National Semiconductor Corporation
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