Adaptive frequency compensation for maximum and constant bandwidth feedback amplifiers

We present an adaptive frequency compensation technique providing maximum bandwidth closed-loop amplifiers. The approach exploits an auxiliary variable gain amplifier to implement an electrically tunable compensation capacitor proportional to the feedback factor. In this manner, the closed-loop bandwidth is kept ideally constant irrespective of the closed-loop gain. The proposed method can be applied to any amplifier adopting dominant-pole compensation. As an example, we designed a CMOS amplifier providing 66-dB direct current gain and 310-MHz gain-bandwidth product. For closed-loop gains ranging from 1 to 10, the closed-loop bandwidth was found never lower than 401MHz (noinverting configuration) and 229MHz (inverting configuration). A similar amplifier with equal gain-bandwidth product, but adopting the traditional fixed compensation approach, would exhibit a closed-loop bandwidth reduced to 33MHz (noninverting) and 30MHz (inverting) when the gain magnitude is set to 10. The enhanced frequency performance is obtained with a 48% increase in current consumption, whereas the other main operational amplifier performance parameters remain almost unchanged compared with the standard solution. Copyright (c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.