An overview of feed-forward design techniques for high-gain wideband operational transconductance amplifiers

In this paper, feed-forward techniques are revised and used for the design of high-frequency operational transconductance amplifiers (OTA). For the same power consumption and similar transistor dimensions, the two- and three-path folded-cascode OTA's present both smaller settling error and faster response as compared to the typical folded-cascode topology.Also, a no-capacitor feed-forward (NCFF) compensation which uses a high-frequency pole–zero doublet to obtain high gain, high GBW and a good phase margin is discussed. The settling-time of the NCFF topology can be faster than that of OTA's with Miller compensation, even if the latter topology uses larger transconductance values. Experimental results for the multi-trajectory OTA's fabricated in the AMI 0.5 μm CMOS process demonstrate the feasibility of the feed-forward schemes.