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I. INTRODUCTION
Fig. 1. Noise power spectrum of standard CMOS operational amplifier.
TABLE I
CLASSIFICATION OF DYNAMIC OFFSET-CANCELLATION TECHNIQUES
F. Techniques to Reduce the Residual Offset spikes. However, a high introduces gain accuracies if there
An interesting nonstraightforward method to reduce the is a mismatch between and . For a mismatch between
residual offset is shown by Menolfi et al. [10]. They remark and of 1%, a good compromise value for is between
that the energy content of the spikes is mainly located at higher three and five. This value gives a residual offset of 500 nV
harmonics of the chopping frequency, while the energy of the which is the best reported value so far. As already mentioned
modulated signal is mainly located at the fundamental of the before, the major drawback of this circuit is the gain accuracy.
chopping frequency. If the modulated signal that includes the This gain accuracy is dependent on the quality factor and the
spikes is low-pass or bandpass filtered, almost all spikes are matching between and . This implies that already in a
removed, while only a small part of the signal is lost. This relatively small temperature range, large deviations in accuracy
idea is schematically shown in Fig. 7. Compared to a conven- will occur. The accuracy can also not be improved by applying
tional chopper amplifier, a bandpass filter is added within the feedback because of stability problems caused by the phase
amplifier. The center frequency of this bandpass filter is response of the bandpass filter. In conclusion, this technique
equal to the chopping frequency . The quality factor significantly reduces the residual offset at the cost of reduced
should be high, to increase the attenuation of the unwanted gain accuracy.
1880 IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, VOL. 35, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2000
Fig. 10. Nested chopper instrumentation amplifier with spinning-current Hall sensor input.
The low-pass filter is a first-order one with a 3-dB roll-off mines the overall noise performance and has an equivalent input
frequency of 3 Hz. This low-pass filter is added externally, be- thermal noise of approximately 15 nV/ Hz while drawing only
cause of the required large RC constant. In a commercial ver- 35- A tail current. The second stage consists of ,
sion, this low-pass filter can be integrated on the chip by making and and is optimized for high gain and low transconduc-
it a part of an integrating A/D converter, such as a sigma–delta tance. The high gain is necessary to reduce the influence of off-
A/D converter. sets of the subsequent stages outside the choppers. The reason
The instrumentation amplifier can be divided in two equal for the low transconductance is to have a low unity-gain fre-
amplifiers. One of these amplifiers is shown in detail in Fig. 11. quency which implies an intrinsic filtering of the modulated
The amplifier is a four-stage operational amplifier. The first offset. This will be discussed more elaborately later. The low
stage which is formed by , and is a low-gain transconductance is achieved by using a small tail current of
low-noise stage. This stage has a gain of approximately twenty. only 500 nA and a very low W/L ratio. The first two stages of the
The noise performance is optimized firstly by using resistors amplifier are kept fully differential to reduce effects of charge
and instead of an active load and secondly by choosing injection of the chopper switches. To define the common-mode
a high over ratio of input transistors and in such a voltage on the drains of and , a common-mode control
way that they are biased in weak inversion. The first stage deter- circuit is necessary. This is done by measuring the common-
1882 IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, VOL. 35, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2000
Fig. 14. Explanation of the result that the residual offset is dependent on f .
140 dB. This shows again the excellent common-mode rejec- [10] C. Menolfi and Q. Huang, “A fully integrated CMOS instrumentation
tion ratio (CMRR) performance of chopper amplifiers, which amplifier with submicrovolt offset,” IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol.
34, pp. 415–420, Mar. 1999.
was already known from previous designs [2]. A performance
summary is shown in Table II.
REFERENCES
[1] A. Bakker, A. A. Bellekom, S. Middelhoek, and J. H. Huijsing,
“Low-offset low-noise 3.5-mW CMOS spinning-current Hall effect Kevin Thiele, biography and photograph not available at time of publication.
sensor with integrated chopper amplifier,” in Proc. Eurosensors XIII,
Sept. 1999, pp. 1045–1048.
[2] C. C. Enz and G. C. Temes, “Circuit techniques for reducing the effects
of opamp imperfections: Autozeroing, correlated double sampling, and
chopper stabilization,” Proc. IEEE, vol. 84, pp. 1584–1614, Nov. 1996. Johan H. Huijsing (SM’81–F’97) was born in Ban-
[3] C. C. Enz, E. A. Vittoz, and F. Krummenacher, “A CMOS chopper am- dung, Indonesia, on May 21, 1938. He received the
plifier,” IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol. SC-22, pp. 335–342, June M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the Delft
1987. University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, in
[4] K. C. Hsieh, P. R. Gray, D. Senderowicz, and D. G. Messerschmitt, 1969, and the Ph.D. degree from the same university
“A low-noise chopper stabilized differential switched-capacitor filtering in 1981.
technique,” IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol. SC-16, pp. 708–715, Dec. He has been an Assistant and Associate Professor
1981. in electronic instrumentation with the Faculty
[5] C. G. Yu and R. L. Geiger, “An automatic offset compensation scheme of Electrical Engineering, Delft University of
with ping-pong control for CMOS operational amplifiers,” IEEE J. Technology, since 1969, where he became a full
Solid-State Circuits, vol. 29, pp. 601–610, May 1994. Professor in the Chair of electronic instrumentation
[6] I. E. Opris and G. T. A. Kovacs, “A rail-to-rail ping-pong opamp,” IEEE in 1990. From 1982 through 1983, he was a Senior Scientist at Philips Research
J. Solid-State Circuits, vol. 31, pp. 1320–1324, Sept. 1996. Labs, Sunnyvale, CA. Since 1983, he has been a Consultant for Philips. His
[7] (1999, May) TLC4501, Self-calibrating operational amplifier. Texas In- research work is particulary focused on the systematic analysis and design of
struments Inc., Dallas, TX. [Online]. Available: http://www.ti.com operational amplifiers and integrated smart sensors. He is author or co-author
[8] G. C. M. Meijer, “Concepts and focus point for intelligent sensor sys- of some 150 scientific papers, 20 patents and four books, and co-editor of
tems,” Sensors and Actuators, vol. 41, pp. 183–191, 1994. five books. He is initiator and Co-Chairman of the International Workshop on
[9] (1999, June) LTC1050, Precision chopper stabilized operational ampli- Advances in Analog Circuit Design, which has been held annually since 1992.
fier with internal capacitors. Linear Technology, Milpitas, CA. [Online]. He is Chairman of the biannual National Workshop on Sensor Technology,
Available: http://www.linear.com since 1991, and Chairman of the Dutch STW Platform on Sensor Technology.