Fully Differential Programmable Gain Chiplet for Integrated Data Acquisition Systems

Abstract

Chiplets have risen in popularity since their intermediate level of chip integration allows for high performance, low cost, and higher flexibility. There are currently programmable gain instrumentation amplifier chips on the market, which are widely used in industrial and instrumentation data acquisition systems. However, with built-in operational and fully differential amplifiers, these products cannot be easily upgraded as new and improved amplifiers are released to the market. To address this issue, this thesis proposes the design of a programmable gain chiplet that will offer the desired flexibility in changing a system’s gain, but will add the ability to interface with various amplifiers without sacrificing significant performance.