Japanese researchers develop low-power amplifiers for high-spatial-resolution biomedical and environment monitoring system
Small-area, low-power, low-noise instrumentation amplifiers (IA) are critical components of arrayed sensor devices used for high-spatial-resolution biomedical and environment monitoring system.
However, in order to realize small offset voltages of IA, conventional IAs utilize analog filters -composed of large passive components, resistors and capacitors – resulting in large silicon chips.
Ippei Akita and a colleague at Toyohashi University of Technology have developed a novel architecture for fabricating smaller sized integrated circuit chips. The technique is based on a digital calibration scheme for minimizing the offset voltage of the IA circuit, instead of an analog scheme used in conventional circuits.
The offset exists mainly at the first-stage circuit of IA. In this design, the researchers introduced a reconfigurable first-stage circuit. The best configuration for minimizing the offset was easily determined by calibration logic which was implemented in a small area compared to analog circuits.
The proposed IA was implemented in a standard 0.18 micrometer CMOS and resulted with an offset voltage of < 3.5 μV while drawing a current of 194 μA. The active area of the IA is 7.8 times smaller than conventional state-of-the-art chips while maintaining low noise and low power.
The researchers plan to use the proposed IA for the fabrication of an arrayed IA for high-spatial-resolution and real-time sensing systems.
Visit Toyohashi University of Technology at www.tut.ac.jp/english/
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