A 300mV-Supply, sub-nW-Power Digital-Based Operational Transconductance Amplifier

An ultra-low voltage and ultra-low power Digital-Based Operational Transconductance Amplifier (DB-OTA) is presented and demonstrated on silicon in 180 nm CMOS. The DBOTA is designed using digital standard cells, hence benefitting from technology scaling as much as digital circuits, while also being technology- and design-portable, and requiring minimal design and integration effort compared to conventional analog intensive OTAs.The fabricated DB-OTA testchip occupies a compact area of 1,426 μm2, operates at supply voltages down to 300 mV, and consumes only 590 pW while driving a capacitive load of 80pF. Its measured Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) is lower than 5% at a 100-mV input signal swing. Based on these results, the proposed DB-OTA achieves 2,101 V-1 small-signal figure of merit (FOMS) and 1,070 large-signal figure of merit (FOML). To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the power is the lowest reported to date in an OTA, and the achieved figures of merit are the best in sub-500 mV OTAs reported to date. The low cost, the low design effort and the high power efficiency of DB-OTA make it well suited for purely harvested low-frequency analog interfaces in sensor nodes.