An Investigation of the Operating Principles and Power Consumption of Digital-Based Analog Amplifiers

Digital-based differential amplifiers (DDA) are particularly suitable to low voltage digital integrated circuit technologies. This paper presents an exhaustive analysis of digital-based analog amplifiers to take advantage of today’s high-performance digital technologies, and of computer aided design (CAD), which is commonly employed to design integrated circuits. The operating principle and the main mathematical relations of digital-based differential amplifiers are discussed along with an exhaustive explanation of its operating regions and of the corresponding power consumption. These aspects, which are not discussed in the literature, are very important for the circuit designers. Finally, a detailed description of the design procedure of the UMC 180nm standard CMOS technology is provided.