Conclusions and Future Prospects

Abstract

In recent years, electronics designers, especially designers of amplifiers, have been struggling to overcome the challenges associated with the reduction of the intrinsic gain of active devices, i.e., transistors, with even higher impact on deeper nanoscale technologies. On another hand, the nowadays technological market demands circuits and systems with elevated energy efficiency and possibly small area, in order to ensure portability and comfort for the daily users. Particularly, in the context of mixed signal, i.e., ADC architectures, designers have been seeking for alternative ways to avoid the usage of amplifiers, in order to improve the power consumption, increasing the complexity of the circuits, and hence lowering their reliability with also a direct penalty in terms of area spent. This work contributes to the advancement of the state of the art, by proposing a complete new family of single-stage transconductance amplifiers with elevated energy efficiency, with also an innovative gain enhancement strategy that avoids the need for cascode devices, i.e., the output signal swing is improved and, therefore, is clearly more appropriate to follow the tendency of using low voltage supplies, in nowadays circuitry. Both simulation and experimental evaluation are presented.