High efficiency Low distortion class-G CMOS amplifier

What is it about?

Power efficient amplifiers are always desired to extend battery life of portable devices, and class-G amplifiers provide higher efficiency than class-AB while retaining the good linearity. However, to enable the power dissipation savings, the class-G amplifier has to switch its power supply from a higher value to a smaller value and during this transition distortion occurs. This work presents a solution to this problem by introducing a gradual power supply switching scheme.

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Why is it important?

The gradual transition introduced by this work retains the linearity performance in the amplifier without extra complexity. By introducing a new biasing scheme and negative feedback, the circuit linearizes the transition distortion while providing class-G operation for increased efficiency. All other works present distortion during the transition due to the hard switching on the supplies, while this work minimizes this distortion due to the gradual or soft switching on the supplies.