Design of integrated BiCMOS operational amplifiers with low-probability EMI-induced-failures

Abstract Electromagnetic interference may cause failures in operational amplifiers. The probability of these failures can be reduced by properly designing the opamp, once the failure mechanism has been discovered. In this paper the design of some integrated BiCMOS operational amplifiers with a very low-probability of electromagnetic interference (EMI) induced failures is reported. In particular, it is shown that opamps exhibiting good general performances as well as low EMI-susceptibility can be obtained only if their response to a large square-wave input signal is symmetric and the influence of some parasitic capacitances in the input stage is compensated. Following these guide-lines, we found possible to design BiCMOS opamp structures exhibiting EMI susceptibility of only a few mV up to several hundred MHz when they are driven with an interfering input signal of some volts.