Comparative Analysis of Recent Instrumentation Amplifier Designs for Low-Power Applications

An amplifier is designed for either high gain or wide bandwidth. Instrumentation amplifiers (IA) are designed for higher gain and less noise, and are mostly applied to reading biomedical signals. It has wide application based on the signal strength. The variants of IA design include folded cascode designs for improving the gain. A lower node design or sub-threshold region based design further reduces the power consumption making it more efficient. A comparative analysis is carried out to showcase the differences in these designs. The traditional design equations are compared to modern designs to mark the growth of new methodologies. The comparison is based on the gain, CMRR, and power dissipation. The target technology is set to be 180nm, for generating an even comparison.