A short course on gm/ID design methodologies - Part II : vTools eNotice

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A short course on gm/ID design methodologies - Part II

Design methods for analog integrated circuits based on gm/ID have the key feature of being based on a magnitude (the gm/ID ratio) that provides information about the transistor operation independently of its width (W, letting aside very narrow transistors rarely applied in analog design) and length (L), except for a slight dependence on L in short channel devices. A general characteristic for the transistors of a given length in each process is obtained. Therefore, it gives a global view and orientation about the design space. This makes it very suitable for helping the designer to gain insight on how to tune the design and, particularly, aiding novel designers to quickly find their way in the analog design art. The same applies to the, somehow “dual”, inversion coefficient (IC) based methods. Both methods are based on magnitudes (gm/ID and IC) that are ratios (or proportional to ratios) of key magnitudes of the transistor operation.

Extensions and evolutions of the gm/ID method have, implicitly or explicitly, identified this “ratio-based characteristic” and have shown the advantages of considering other key ratios of magnitudes that share the same characteristics as gm/ID of be W independent. The approach presented is particularly appropriate for nanoscale devices where multiple unitary devices in parallel are usually applied.

This short course will provide an overview of these ratio-based analog design approaches, contributing to showing a general vision about them. These methods originally targeted small signal analog design. Examples of extension of the basic idea to nonlinear RF blocks (power amplifiers and envelope detectors) as well as to distortion analysis will be shown.