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Design and analysis of high-gain amplifiers in flexible self-aligned a-IGZO thin-film transistor technology

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Abstract

This paper presents two high-gain amplifiers fabricated in a flexible self-aligned amorphous indium gallium zinc oxide thin-film transistor (TFT) technology. One common-source amplifier relies on positive feedback to provide a voltage gain of 17 dB, and a bandwidth of 79 kHz from a dc power of only 0.76 mW. One cascode amplifier provides a voltage gain of 25 dB, and a bandwidth of 220 kHz from a dc power of 2.32 mW. The chip areas of the amplifiers are 7.5 and 10.3 mm2, respectively. By using a gain-enhancement technique in the first amplifier, gain, dc power consumption, and chip area are greatly improved. The presented amplifiers are designed for using as audio pre-amplifiers in a radio receiver. The presented measurements confirm that the amplifiers meet the requirements for this purpose. The circuits are designed using the Verilog-A Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute-amorphous TFT model; circuit simulations are also presented for comparison with the hardware characterization. Additionally, the impact of process variations on the amplifiers is analyzed and discussed in details.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partly funded by the European Commission, under project FLEXIBILTY (Grant 287568), and by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the Organic Path Cluster of Excellence “Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chair for Circuit Design and Network Theory, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

    R. Shabanpour, T. Meister, K. Ishida, B. Kheradmand-Boroujeni, C. Carta & F. Ellinger

  2. Electronic Laboratory and Wearable Computing Group, Swiss Federal Institute for Technology Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    L. Petti, N. Münzenrieder, G. A. Salvatore & G. Tröster

Authors
  1. R. Shabanpour
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  2. T. Meister
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  3. K. Ishida
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  4. B. Kheradmand-Boroujeni
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  5. C. Carta
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  6. F. Ellinger
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  7. L. Petti
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  8. N. Münzenrieder
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  9. G. A. Salvatore
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  10. G. Tröster
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Correspondence to R. Shabanpour.

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Shabanpour, R., Meister, T., Ishida, K. et al. Design and analysis of high-gain amplifiers in flexible self-aligned a-IGZO thin-film transistor technology. Analog Integr Circ Sig Process 87, 213–222 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10470-015-0655-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10470-015-0655-3

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