Operational Amplifiers for Low Power Applications

The Customer:

Japan based leading semiconductor company designs and manufactures semiconductors, Integrated circuits and other electronic components. One of the offering includes broad range of Operational Amplifiers featuring low noise, low saturation, low current consumption, and input/output full swing.

Project Description & Scope:

• To meet the increasing demands by electronic devices for lower power consumption and reduced voltage operation customer needed series of low current Operational Amplifiers
• Design & Development of more than 20 variants of Operational Amplifiers
• Implementation: Bipolar, CMOS & BiCMOS technology and to different technology nodes
• Target the designs to Customer preferred Foundry, Process parameters & Circuit extraction of the reference products by customer
• Characterization of reference Operational Amplifiers for various performance parameters
• Circuit design, layout design of new Operational Amplifiers for varied performance parameters

Typical Specs: Voltage range: From 1.8V to Max 32V Low Offset / Low Noise series High Slew rate devices High Sink & Source Currents UGB ranging from 1MHz to 12 MHz Temperature range from –60 to +150 Degree

The Solution:

• Design Architecture changes to exceed Reference device specifications
• Circuit Design & Simulation, Layout Design till the final GDSII release
• Successful overcome Foundry Migration challenges and Technology migration
• Documentation including Datasheet preparation
• Silicon Characterization:
  • Functional testing and characterization of reference products (at different Voltages and temperature, 3rd party partner)
  • Test Board design and development for device characterization & Test Program Development
  • Results summary & Graphs generation

Business Benefits:

• We developed 27 Op Amps concurrently in short span to create market leadership for customers product
• Dedicated Japan Support Team(JST) for ease of communication and coordination
• Created scope for customer to enter new markets with low power applications such as Digital cameras, Bluetooth/WLAN/Sensor modules, Mobile phones, Portable Multimedia Devices, Headsets, Notebook PCs, Navigation systems, Surveillance cameras, different sensors to name few