Chopper Stabilized Amplifiers: Course - ECE 1352 Analog Integrated Circuits I Professor - K. Phang
Chopper Stabilized Amplifiers: Course - ECE 1352 Analog Integrated Circuits I Professor - K. Phang
Chopper Stabilized Amplifiers: Course - ECE 1352 Analog Integrated Circuits I Professor - K. Phang
Professor K. Phang
Yiqian Ying
930360680
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Toronto
Nov. 12, 2001
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amplifiers solved the bandwidth limitations by combining the chopper amplifier with a
conventional wideband amplifier that remained in the signal path. However, simple
chopper stabilized designs are capable of inverting operation only since the stabilizing
amplifier is connected to the non-inverting input of the wideband amplifier [2].
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m(t ) 2
2 cos(2f kt )
.
chop
k
sin
k 1
(1)
Its k-th Fourier-coefficients, Mk, have the property:
M 0 M 2 M 4 ... 0
(2)
The modulated signal is the product of the initial signal and equation (1). The spectrum of
the product Vinm1(t) in Fig. 1 shows that the signal is transposed to the odd harmonic
frequencies of the modulating signal. After amplification, the modulated signal is then
demodulated by multiplying m2(t) to obtain
Vd (t ) 4 AVin (t )
k 1
k
l
sin
2 cos 2f
2 cos(2f lt )
kt
chop
chop
k
l
l 1
2
2
sin
Fig. 2 shows the Fourier transform of this noiseless demodulated output signal.
(3)
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To recover the original signal in amplified form, the demodulated signal is applied to a
low-pass filter with a cut-off frequency slightly above the input signal bandwidth, in this
case, half of the chopper frequency.
Noise and offset are modulated only once. If SN(f) denotes the power spectral
density (PSD) of the noise and offset, then the PSD of (VOS + VN)m2(t) is:
S CS ( f )
M 2 k 1 S N ( f
2k 1
2
)
(2k 1)
SN ( f
2k 1
)
T
(4)
So noise and offset are translated to the odd harmonic frequencies of the modulating
signal, leaving the chopper amplifier ideally without any offset or low-frequency noise.
Assume the input signal Vin is a dc signal, if the amplifier has an infinite
bandwidth and no delay, the signal at its output, VA, is simply the same square wave with
an amplitude AVin and the signal after demodulation is again a dc signal of value AVin.
In a less ideal situation, the amplifier would have a limited bandwidth, say up to twice the
chopper frequency with a constant gain of A and is zero elsewhere (ideal low-pass). As
shown in Fig. 3 [3], the amplifier output signal VA(t) is now a sinewave corresponding to
the fundamental component of the chopped dc signal with an amplitude (4/)(AVin). The
output Vout of the second modulator is then a rectified sinewave containing even-order
harmonic frequencies components. The output will have to be low-pass filtered to recover
the desired amplified signal. After low-pass filtering, the dc value is (8/2)(AVin), thus an
approximately 20% degradation on dc gain. So a larger bandwidth of the main amplifier
results in a bigger dc gain.
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Delay introduced by the main amplifier could also cause degradation on overall
dc gain. For example, if the amplifier has an infinite bandwidth but introduces a constant
delay of T/4 while the input and output modulators are in phase, the output signal would
be a chopped cosinewave, without a dc component and containing only odd harmonics,
i.e., the overall dc gain of the chopper stabilized amplifier is zero. If there is the same
constant delay between the input and output modulators, i.e., t in Fig. 1 equals T/4, the
output signal is a rectified sinewave. These conclude that in order to maximize dc gain of
the chopper amplifier, the phase shift between the two modulators needs to match
precisely the phase shift introduced by the main amplifier [3].
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Typically, fc equals five times the chopper frequency fchop = 1/T. In baseband (
f 0.5 f chop
S CS white ( f ) S CS white ( f 0) S 0 1
tanh(
f cT )
2
f cT
2
(5)
And for f c f chop , S CS white can be further approximated to
S CS white ( f ) S 0
for
f 0.5 f chop
and f c f chop .
(6)
So the baseband PSD of the noise is nearly constant for large fc of the main amplifier. And
the chopped-modulated PSD is smaller than but asymptotically approaches the PSD of
the original white noise.
For 1/f noise, the input PSD is given by
S N 1 / f ( f ) S 0
fk
f
(7)
where fk is the amplifier corner frequency. If we substitute this input PSD into equation
(2), i.e., when the low-frequency noise is translated higher frequencies, the odd
harmonics of fchop, the 1/f noise pole disappears from the baseband. Simulation shows that
the chopped 1/f noise PSD in baseband can be approximated by [3]
S CS 1 / f ( f ) 0.8525S 0 f k T .
(8)
The total input-referred residual noise in the baseband for a typical amplifier is the
sum of equation (6) and equation (8), given by
S CS ( f ) S 0 (1 0.8525 f k T )
(9)
for
f 0.5 f chop
and f c f chop .
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It is reasonable to choose the chopper frequency fchop equal to the amplifier corner
frequency fk. The resulting white noise PSD increase is less than 6dB. This has been
verified experimentally according to [3].
Fig. 4. (a) Spike signal at the input of the amplifier (b) spectra of spike signal of chopper-modulated signal
with amplifier bandwidth characteristics
The time constant in general is much smaller than T/2, so the energy of the spike
signal concentrates at frequencies higher than the chopper frequency. The spectra of the
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spikes and the chopper-modulated signal at the input of the main amplifier are shown in
Fig. 4(b). The input-referred offset can be calculated as [3]:
2
Vspike
T
VOS
(10)
Using an amplifier with a bandwidth much larger than the chopper frequency fchop
results in a dc gain approaching maximum gain A, as discussed in section II. However,
this also leads to a maximum output offset voltage since almost all of the spectral
components of the spike signal will contribute. A good compromise is to limit the
bandwidth of the amplifier to twice the chopper frequency. The overall dc gain will be
(8/2)A = 0.81A, only 19% degradation while the offset voltage is reduced drastically.
The new value is [3]
2
VOS
Vspike .
(11)
C
h
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corresponds to the total capacitance at the switch drain (the hold capacitor) and Cp
corresponds to the total parasitic capacitance at the source.
A. Complementary Switches
This is the simplest technique. The theory is that the charges released by one
switch are absorbed by the complementary switch to build its channel. However, it is
difficult to match precisely channel charges of an n-MOS device and a p-MOS device.
Phase jitter between the two complementary clocks further degrades the charge
mismatch.
B. Larger Capacitance
A more efficient technique is to make Cp much larger than Ch and choose a slow
clock transition. Most of the channel charges will be attracted to the larger capacitor Cp,
leaving almost zero charges to Ch on the output side. Disadvantage of this technique is
that it sets a limit on the maximum clock frequency.
C. Fully Differential Structure
An example of a fully differential structure is shown in Fig. 6. If we purposely set
Cp = Ch, the resulting voltage appears as a common-mode voltage and is rejected. This
usually requires the generation of delayed-cutoff clock phases [3].
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D. Multistage Cascading
Several single-stage amplifiers can be cascaded to achieve high gain and speed. A
sample circuit is shown in Fig. 7.
Switches S1, S2, , SN are opened successively. The effective offset voltage is
only determined by charge injection of switch SN into capacitor CN in the last stage.
Offset voltages at earlier stages get cancelled. The equivalent input-referred offset is
VOS
qinj N
1
A1 A2 ... AN
CN
(12)
where qinj is the injected charge. This offset voltage is much smaller than that obtained for
a single-stage low-gain amplifier.
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dynamics of chopper stabilized amplifiers are complex if input bandwidths greater than
the carrier chopping frequency are required.
Comparing to correlated double sampling (CDS) technique which can be used to
enhance the effective gain of the op-amps, CHS technique causes the op-amp to amplify a
higher-frequency signal, hence its effective gain is usually reduced as discussed in section
II. Also the dc offset of a chopper stabilized amplifier is not eliminated, only modulated
to higher frequencies. CDS is the method of choice when high dc gain and maximum
signal swing are desired; In contrast, CHS is preferable for continuous-time systems and
when low baseband noise is a critical requirement.
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VIII. Applications
Chopper stabilized amplifiers are a part of the design for A/D converters that are
immune from the influence of low-frequency noise at the modulator input. The
comparators have been realized by chopper-stabilized amplifiers to reduce the effect of
the offset voltage of the MOS amplifiers since the 70s [5].
In general, chopper stabilized amplifiers are low-noise continuous-time amplifiers
useful for amplifying dc and very low frequency signals, mainly used for instrumentation
application such as biomedical electronics and optoelectronics. Often the design objective
is to reach the microvolt level for both offset and noise, with a bandwidth limited to a few
hundred Hz while maintaining the power consumption below 100 W [3].
One typical application example is capacitive sensors for measurement of
acceleration and pressure. Utilization of chopper stabilization removes the effects of
offset, 1/f noise and switch charge injection. High resolution and low drift can be
achieved [6].
Edge detector of image-sensors can also be chopped-stabilized. With CDS readout
technique, two dimensional photodiode array can be efficiently build with only one
readout circuit providing a bi-directional edge detection capability for high resolution
image sensing applications operating at high frequencies [7].
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concept of CHS can be extended to linear dynamical and certain types of nonlinear
circuits proved by [9].
Switched capacitors are often sensitive to parasitic capacitances from either
terminal of the capacitors to the ground. A parasitic insensitive solution for a fully
balanced circuit is shown in Fig. 9 [9]; The symbol for the chopper and a traditional
chopper stabilized fully balanced amplifier are shown in Fig. 10.
Fig. 10. (a)circuit symbol for the chopper, ( b) traditional chopper stabilized fully balanced amplifier
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of the amplifier input offset, low-frequency input noise components, and residual offsets
due to input switching spikes, without requiring any low-pass filtering. One requirement
is that the input signal spectrum bandwidth is smaller than 0.2 times the Nyquist
frequency. However, this approach suffers a white-noise degradation due to the hold
function; this degradation is minimized when maximum allowable duty cycle is 0.5 and
the amplifier bandwidth is at its minimum [10].
This year, many companies released new products utilizing CHS technique. For
example, The A3425LK dual chopper-stabilized, ultra-sensitive, bipolar Hall-effect
switch of Allegro Microsystems is an extremely temperature-stable and stress-resistant
sensor. Its superior high-temperature performance is made possible through dynamic
offset cancellation by CHS, which reduces the residual offset voltage caused by device
overmolding, temperature dependencies, and thermal stress [11].
In July of 2001, company Intersil released its new product ICL7650. It is said to
bring a new era in glitch-free chopper stabilized amplifiers [12]. A single full-time
main amplifier is used to avoid any output glitches; And input switching glitches are
minimized by careful area- and charge-balancing on the network of input switches. The
chopper operation is performed by means of a nulling amplifier which shares on input
with the main amplifier [12].
X. Conclusion
Chopping stabilization is one of the two major techniques for suppression of the
low-frequency noise. Chopping stabilization is preferred over the other technique,
autozeroing, when the system is linear and low baseband noise is the most important
requirement. Chopper stabilized amplifiers are best suited for low-power, portable, very
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low-noise, very small offset and offset drift, high performance applications such as
electronic sensors. New products that apply chopping stabilization technique are available
every year. Usage of this technique will continue to be broadened as more researches are
made on this topic.
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References
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11. 3425 datasheet, Allegro Microsystems, January. 2001, Available at:
http://www.allegromicro.com/datafile/3425.pdf
12. P. Bradshaw, The ICL7650S: a new era in glitch-free chopper stabilized amplifiers,
Application Note, Intersil, July 2001, Available at:
http://www.intersil.com/data/AN/AN0/AN053/AN053.pdf