Low-Power, Minimally Invasive Process Compensation Technique for Sub-Micron CMOS Amplifiers

Process variation is an obstacle in designing reliable CMOS mixed signal systems with high yield. To minimize the variation in voltage gain due to variations in process, supply voltage, and temperature for common transconductance-based amplifiers, we present a new compensation method based on statistical feedback of process information. We develop the background theory of the scheme and present its performance across process corners. We further apply our scheme to two well known amplifier topologies in the TSMC 65 nm CMOS process as design examples-an inductive degenerated low-noise amplifier (LNA) and a common source amplifier (CSA). Measured results over 100 chips of the LNA show that our compensation technique reduces variation in gain by a factor of 3.7× compared to the baseline case. The CSA exhibits similar reductions in gain variation across 88 measured chips. We also present measured results demonstrating how our technique alleviates voltage gain variations caused by temperature and supply voltage changes.