Linearity-Enhanced Ring Amplifier Using Adaptive Slew-Rate Feed-Forward Path

This brief presents a novel adaptive slew-rate ring amplifier. The proposed technique enhances the linearity, without stability degradation, using a rail-to-rail controlled feed-forward path used in parallel with the main ring amplifier. It offers additional degrees of freedom to improve the linearity/power consumption trade-off proposed in other reported slew-rate enhancement techniques. The proposed design has been implemented and simulated in a low-cost CMOS 65 nm technology. Operating from a single 0.9 V power supply, it consumes 186μA for switching frequency of 210MHz. For the same current consumption, it achieves an improvement of 10 dB in the total harmonic distortion (THD) compared to state-of-the-art.