CICC EDU Session 2020- Ringamp: The Scalable Amplifier We’ve All Been Waiting For? Ben Hershberg

Conventional opamps have not scaled gracefully into nanoscale CMOS, and the quest for a general-purpose replacement continues to challenge the research community. This has fundamentally reshaped the field of ADCs in the last decade, where designers have been forced toward architectures that avoid linear amplifiers as much as possible. This evolutionary pressure has in many ways been a boon, stimulating new approaches and ways of thinking. But it also raises the question: what opportunities for creativity and innovation did we lose when we left opamps behind? What impact would a viable successor have on the ADC landscape? Ring amplification is an emerging technique that offers the possibility of high efficiency, high performance, scalable, and general-purpose switched capacitor amplification. This talk will begin with a discussion of what exactly a “ringamp” is, how it works, and why it works so well. We will then go through a practical design example and see how the modelling and validation process is fundamentally different from conventional opamp design. We will also consider challenges such as PVT robustness. With a foundation in place, we will expand to considerations of topology choices and performance enhancements that can be used to build the optimal ringamp for a given application.