Sub-1V CMOS OTA with body-driven gain boosting

A low-voltage CMOS amplifier exploiting a new body-driven gain boosting technique is described. Compared to the standard gain boosting approach, the proposed one reduces the minimum supply by one threshold voltage in the single structure, and by two thresholds in an amplifier exploiting two complementary versions. Simulations using a 130-nm process show that a 0.9-V supply voltage is adequate to obtain a single-stage rail-to-rail amplifier with a 55-dB gain, which is 17 dB higher than that achieved by the same amplifier but using the traditional low-voltage cascode approach.