IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Winter 2021 - 27

In Paul Brokaw's case, people can hardly
say his name without mentioning " bandgap "
in the same sentence.

[2] P. Brokaw, " High gain amplifier with rail
to rail range and frequency compensation, " U.S. Patent 6 822 512, Nov. 23, 2004.
[3] P. Brokaw, " High-gain IC amplifier, " U.S.
Patent 4 857 862, Aug. 15, 1989.
[4] R. T. Perry, S. H. Lewis, A. P. Brokaw,
and T. R. Viswanathan, " A 1.4 V supply
CMOS fractional bandgap reference, "
IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol. 42, no. 10,
pp. 2180-2186, Oct. 2007. doi: 10.1109/
JSSC.2007.905236.
[5] Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Penrose_stairs

About the Author

FIGURE 7: A full NLA design from one of Paul Brokaw's patents.

common-emitter configuration, is
still a common-emitter after all of
the transformation. Do you agree?

Liner Notes
To conclude the tour, the cr ude
topology of Figure 5 is shown as
rendered by the hand of the maestro himself in Figure 7. Of course,
Paul has done countless designs in
CMOS, but, for some reason, the
bipolar versions are more beautiful. Maybe it is the headroom of the
older processes that gives the schematics a retro elegance, like listen-

ing to the album on vinyl. However,
if you look closely-and you should
always look very closely at a Brokaw
design in bipolar or CMOS-you are
sure to find hidden flourishes and
tricks that will delight and educate
you. Maybe you should go back and
listen to the whole album, not just
the greatest hits. This is at least my
10th time through the NLA, and I am
still learning things.

References

[1] P. Brokaw, " High gain amplifier with rail
to rail range and frequency compensation, " U.S. Patent 6 563 384, May 13, 2003.

Chris Mangelsdorf (chris.mangelsdorf@
alum.mit.edu) received his B.S. degree
in physics, magna cum laude, from
Davidson College, North Carolina, in
1977. In 1980 and 1984, he received
his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical
engineering from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, where he
held the first Analog Devices Fellowship. He has been associated with
Analog Devices Inc. since summer
employment in 1980 and has been a
Fellow of Analog Devices since 1998.
From 1996 to 2013, he worked in
Tokyo, running the Analog Devices
Tokyo Design Center and then adding responsibility for the Shanghai
and Beijing Design Centers with
the title of Asia technical director.
In 2013, he moved to the Analog
Devices San Diego office, where he
was engaged in the development of
high speed analog-to-digital converters. As of September 2020, he
retired from Analog Devices to pursue a career in fashion modeling.
He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa
and Sigma Pi Sigma (physics) and
has served on both the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) Program Committee
and the IEEE Solid-State Circuits
Society's Administrative Committee. He holds 18 patents and has
won the ISSCC Best Evening Session
Award nine times. He is a Life Member of IEEE.

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W I N T E R 2 0 2 1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_stairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_stairs

IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Winter 2021

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