Slew-rate enhancement techniques to be used with silicon calorimeters charge sensitive preamplifiers

Circuit techniques for improving the slew-rate performance of a folded-cascode charge sensitive preamplifier to be used in silicon calorimeters are proposed. The solution consists of an additional circuit, active only during the slewing period. It operates by enhancing the amount of the current steered to the output capacitance or with frequency compensation which depends on the signal amplitude. The proposed solutions require negligible extra bias power and small additional area. The slew-rate is enhanced without changing the small signal response and the noise performance.