A 1-V 1-mW high-speed class AB operational amplifier for high-speed low power pipelined A/D converters using "Slew Boost" technique

An ultra-low-voltage low-power high-speed class-AB operational amplifier with a new structure is presented. A new technique called "Slew Boost" is introduced to improve amplifier's large-signal settling behavior, most useful in switched-capacitor circuits such as pipelined ADCs, sigma delta modulators, etc. The proposed op-amp has been designed to be employed in the first stage of a 10bit 150MSamples/sec pipelined analog-to-digital converter. Simulation results of the proposed fully-differential class-AB op-amp using 0.18um CMOS process models, confirm that it has an output swing of 1.5 Vp-p and consumes less than 1mW from a single supply of 1 volt.