Symbolic behavioral modeling for slew and settling analysis of operational amplifiers

Traditionally symbolic techniques are used for analyzing small-signal circuit behaviors. They are not suitable for analyzing the large-signal transient responses of operational amplifiers (op-amps). This paper combines a symbolic dominant pole technique with a popular slew and settling analysis technique existing in the literature to form a symbolic transient analysis method which can be used for fast characterization of the op-amp behavior in the time-domain. A unified technique for slew and settling characterization is proposed. Experimental results have validated that the proposed method can calculate the slew and settling time of a two-stage op-amp more accurately for both large and small current designs.