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A low-power, second-order Δ/Σ modulator using a single class-AB op-amp for voice-band applications

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Abstract

The design of a power-efficient second-order Δ/Σ modulator for voice-band is presented. At system level, a new single-loop, single-stage modulator is proposed. The modulator employs only one class-AB op-amp to realize a second-order noise shaping for voice-band applications. The modulator is designed in a 0.25μm standard CMOS process, and exhibits 86 dB dynamic range (DR) for a 4 kHz voice-bandwidth. The proposed modulator consumes 125μW from a 2.5 V supply.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Irvine, CA

    Aminghasem Safarian & Payam Heydari

  2. Tripath Technology Inc., San Jose, California

    Farzad Sahandiesfanjani

  3. Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

    S. Mojtaba Atarodi

Authors
  1. Aminghasem Safarian
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  2. Farzad Sahandiesfanjani
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  3. Payam Heydari
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  4. S. Mojtaba Atarodi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Aminghasem Safarian.

Additional information

Aminghasem Safarian received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the Sharif University of Technology, in 2000, 2002, respectively. Since 2003 he is a research assistant at University of California, Irvine, working toward his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering emphasizing on RF IC design for wireless communication systems.

During the summer of 2005, he was with Broadcom Corporation, Irvine, CA, where he developed integrated receivers for RFID and WCDMA applications.

Farzad Sahandiesfanjani was born in Tabriz, Iran in 1976. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electronics from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 1998 and 2000, respectively. The subject of his thesis was the design of 4th order cascade delta-sigma modulator for ADSL Analog Front End.

From 1998 to 2003, he was with Emad Semicon Co., Tehran, Iran, where he designed circuits for voice application such as CODEC and SLIC chip. He also designed a 3rd order single loop class-D delta-sigma modulator for audio application.

He joined Tripath Technology Inc., San Jose, CA, in 2003 and has been working on the design of analog and mixed-signal circuits for class-T audio power amplifier. He is also author of one patent for inductor-less switching audio power amplifier and also co-author of 3 more pending patents and 4 papers.

Payam Heydari (S'98–M'00) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees (with honors) in electrical engineering from the Sharif University of Technology, in 1992, 1995, respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California, in 2001.

During the summer of 1997, he was with Bell-Labs, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ, where he worked on noise analysis in deep submicron very large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits. During the summer of 1998, he was with IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, where he worked on gradient-based optimization and sensitivity analysis of custom-integrated circuits. Since August 2001, he has been an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, where his research interest is the design of high-speed analog, radio-frequency (RF), and mixed-signal integrated circuits.

Dr. Heydari has received the 2005 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, the 2005 IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Darlington Award, the 2005 Henry Samueli School of Engineering Teaching Excellence Award, the Best Paper Award at the 2000 IEEE International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD), the 2000 Honorable Award from the Department of EE-Systems at the University of Southern California, and the 2001 Technical Excellence Award in the area of Electrical Engineering from the Association of Professors and Scholars of Iranian Heritage (APSIH). He was recognized as the 2004 Outstanding Faculty at the EECS Department of the University of California, Irvine. His name was included in the 2006 Who's Who in America.

Dr. Heydari is an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—part I. He currently serves on the Technical Program Committees of Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), International Symposium on Low-Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED), International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED), and the Local Arrangement Chair of the ISLPED conference. He was the Student Design Contest Judge for the DAC/ISSCC Design Contest Award in 2003, the Technical Program Committee member of the IEEE Design and Test in Europe (DATE) from 2003 to 2004, and International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD) in 2003.

Mojtaba Atarodi received his Ph.D degree from USC (the University of Southern California, Los Angeles), in electrical engineering Electro-physics in 1993, his M.S from University of California at Irvine, and his B.SEE from the Tehran Polytechnic University with first Grade honor. Following his Ph.D completion, he was with Linear Technology Corporation from 1993 to 1996 as an analog design engineer. He has been with Sharif University of Technology as an Assistant and Visiting Professor since 1997. The Author of more than 50 technical journal and conference papers an a book on Analog CMOS IC Design, Dr Atarodi’s main research interests are analog and RF IC system, circuit, and signal processing design as well as analog synthesis tools. Having held several management and consulting positions during the last 15 years in the US industry, he holds one US patent in analog highly linear tunable Operational Transconductance Amplifiers and has applied for 5 more US patents as well.

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Safarian, A., Sahandiesfanjani, F., Heydari, P. et al. A low-power, second-order Δ/Σ modulator using a single class-AB op-amp for voice-band applications. Analog Integr Circ Sig Process 49, 199–211 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10470-006-9567-6

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