A Compact 0.3-V Class AB Bulk-Driven OTA

In this article, a new solution for an ultralow-voltage (ULV) ultralow-power (ULP) operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) is presented. Thanks to the combination of a low-voltage bulk-driven nontailed differential stage with the multipath Miller zero compensation technique, a simple class AB power-efficient ULV structure has been obtained, which can operate from supply voltages less than the threshold voltages of the employed MOS transistors, while offering rail-to-rail input common-mode range at the same time. The proposed OTA was fabricated using the 180-nm CMOS process from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and can operate from VDD ranging from 0.3 to 0.5 V. The 0.3-V version dissipates only 12.6 nW of power while showing a 64.7-dB voltage gain at 1-Hz, 2.96-kHz gain-bandwidth product, and a 4.15-V/ms average slew-rate at 30-pF load capacitance. The measured results agree well with simulations.