Designing operational transconductance amplifiers for low voltage operation

To design operational transconductance amplifiers (OTAs) for high-performance applications it is necessary to use cascoded current mirrors. In low-voltage applications the standard cascoded current mirror cannot be used. The solution is to use the generalized high-swing cascoded current mirror. With these newer OTA designs it is possible to have cascoding in the design without significantly reducing the linear output voltage range. High-swing OTAs already exist. With the authors' generalized scheme, multiple cascoded OTAs can be built. They have significantly larger bandwidth for the same low-frequency gain than single cascoded OTAs, and do not sacrifice any of the linear output voltage range.<>