A new approach for CMOS op-amp synthesis

A new approach for CMOS op-amp circuit synthesis has proposed here. The approach is based on the observation that the first order behavior of an MOS transistor in the saturation region is such that the cost and the constraint functions for this optimization problem can be modeled as convex functions. Second order effects are then handled by formulating the problem as one of solving a sequence of convex programs. Numerical experiments show that the solutions to the sequence of convex programs converges to the same design point for widely varying initial guesses. This strongly suggests that the approach is capable of determining the globally optimal solution to the problem. Performance of the synthesized op-amps has been verified against detailed SPICE simulation for a 1.6 /spl mu/ CMOS process.