Design of a rail-to-rail OTA in 65 nm CMOS technology for a particle detector sensor

Abstract

In the context of particle accelerators for experimental physics, the different detectors convert the energy of a determined particle into an electrical current. This electrical current is then processed using a readout integrated circuit (ROIC) which must fulfill some requirements regarding speed and precision in order to perform an accurate detection. One of the particle detector experiments developed at the world's largest particle accelerator at CERN is the LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty) aimed to observe b-quarks and make precise measurements of CP violation. The ROIC designed for the LHCb experiment is being developed in a joint collaboration between researchers from UB (Universitat de Barcelona) and UPC. It must be capable of integrating the pulse charge of one channel event. One of the main blocks in this ROIC consists of an operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) with a very high gain, GBW and slew-rate designed in CMOS 65 nm technology. The main purpose of this thesis is to design this OTA with fully-differential operation and rail-to-rail swings at both input and output and study how to exploit the advantages that it can add to the experiment.