ABSTRACT

Various circuit techniques have been employed and demonstrated by the amplifiers to achieve low-power operation without compromising too much on the gain, noise, linearity, and size. Most of the time, it is impossible to win everything, thus, some trade-offs will have to be made. But in the end, what really matters is getting the right balance among all the parameters of the amplifier. When designing analog circuits for operation at reduced supply voltages, careful attention must be paid to the signal swing and noise level. Folded cascode is one of the popular techniques, however, using a low-voltage supply process could also ease the design. This is a popular low-power design technique and is also known as weak inversion. The use of this technique in design could obtain very low power consumption, thus prolonging battery life. Current-reuse is low-power design technique that can boost the effective transconductance of low noise amplifier without further increasing drawn current, hence, the total power consumption.