ABSTRACT A new efficient design approach for sizing a high performance analog amplifier circuit namely the Recycling Folded Cascode (RFC) amplifier is presented. A RFC amplifier is an enhanced version of the conventional folded cascode amplifier and achieves better slew rate, gain, bandwidth, offset etc. for same area and power budget. Low frequency amplifiers such as biomedical or neural have a demanding requirement of low area, low power and low noise apart from meeting other optimal design specifications which have inherent trade-off amongst themselves. As a result, manual sizing becomes a computationally inefficient approach. Thus, swarm based optimization techniques have been employed to efficiently determine the optimal sizing for the RFC amplifier such that the area is minimized while meeting all the optimal design specifications considering the constraints. A new hybrid whale particle swarm optimization (HWPSO) algorithm is employed which takes advantage of the good qualities of both the whale algorithm and the PSO algorithm to optimize the area with less computational complexity. Simulations and statistical analysis have been performed and comparisons with other state of art algorithms reveals that HWPSO-based approach achieves a minimum circuit area of 21 µm2 with a mean Friedman’s statistical rank of 2.05 while meeting optimal design specifications for low frequency systems. Finally, validation with circuit design tool Cadence Virtuoso is done and pre as well as post layout analysis have been performed which further illustrated a close agreement with algorithmic results.

中文翻译：

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使用基于新的混合群智能技术的低频应用循环折叠级联放大器的最佳尺寸

摘要 提出了一种新的高效设计方法，用于确定高性能模拟放大器电路的尺寸，即循环折叠级联 (RFC) 放大器。RFC 放大器是传统折叠共源共栅放大器的增强版本，可在相同面积和功率预算下实现更好的压摆率、增益、带宽、偏移等。低频放大器（例如生物医学或神经放大器）除了满足其他具有固有权衡的优化设计规范外，还对小面积、低功率和低噪声有苛刻的要求。因此，手动调整大小成为一种计算效率低下的方法。因此，已经采用基于群的优化技术来有效地确定 RFC 放大器的最佳尺寸，从而使面积最小化，同时满足所有考虑约束的最佳设计规范。采用新的混合鲸鱼粒子群优化（HWPSO）算法，利用鲸鱼算法和PSO算法的优点，以较少的计算复杂度优化区域。已经进行了模拟和统计分析，并与其他最先进的算法进行了比较，表明基于 HWPSO 的方法实现了 21 µm2 的最小电路面积，平均弗里德曼统计等级为 2.05，同时满足低频系统的最佳设计规范。最后，