Current Mirrors

Current mirrors made by using active devices (BJT/ MOSFET and sources) widely used in analog integrated circuits as (a) biasing elements and (b) as load devices for amplifier stages Advantage of using current mirror : (1) Result in superior insensitivity of circuit performance to variants in power Supply and temperature. So current mirrors are used to construct references (2) they are more economical than resistors in terms of the die area required to provide bias current , particularly for small value of bias current. (3) as a load element in transistor amplifiers, the high incremental resistance of the current mirror results in high voltage gain at low power-supply voltages. A current mirror is an clement with at least three terminals, as shown in Fig. below The common terminal is connected to a power supply, and the input current source is connected to the input terminal.

Ideally, the output current is equal to the input current multiplied by a desired current gain.
If the gain is unity, the input current is reflected to the output, leading to the name current mirror.

Ideal characteristics of a current mirror

(a) the output current is equal to the input current multiplied by a desired current gain. (b) the gain is unity, the input current is reflected to the output. (c) the current-mirror gain is independent of input frequency (d) the output current is independent of the voltage between the output and common terminals (e) the voltage between the input and common terminals is zero because this condition allows the entire supply voltage to appear across the input current source

Practice, real transistor-level current mirrors deviations from ideality

(1) The variation of the current mirror output current with changes in voltage at the output terminal. This effect is characterized by the small-signal output resistance R0 , of the current mirror (2) Another important error source is the gain error, which is the dcviation of the gain of a current mirror from its ideal value. (3) When the input current source is connected to the input terminal of areal current mirror, it creates a positive voltage drop, VIN, that reduces the voltage available across the input current source. (4) A positive output voltage, VOUT. is required in practice to make the output current depend mainly on the input current

Simple Current Mirror

Bipolar Current Mirror
The simplest form of a current mirror consists of two transistors

Transistor Q1 is connected as diode , with its collector-base voltage = zero. In this mode, the collector-base junction is off so no injection takes place there, and Q1 operates in the forward-active region. Assume that Q2 also operates in the forward-active region and that both transistors have infinite output resistance. Then lout is controlled by VBE2= VBE1 by KVL. Using KVL equation where VT is the thermal voltage and ls1 and ls2 are the transistor saturation currents. From above equation If the transistors are identical, ls1 and ls2 are equal and above equation shows that the current flowing in the collector of Q1 is mirrored to the collector of Q2 KCL at the collector of Q1 yields If
3F

Therefore, with identical transistors

is large, the base currents are small and

Figure Below shows an MOS version of the simple current mirror

Analysis of this circuit prove that it will act as current mirror if

There are three effect that cause the current mirror to be different from ideal situation as above. (1) Channel length modulation (2) Threshold offset between two transistor (3) Imperfect geometrical matching

Cascode Current Mirror

The cascode current mirror is widely used in MOS technology. where it does not suffer from finite beta, effect. Figure below shows the simplest form. the cascade connection achieves a very high output resistance. Since this is a desirable characteristic for a current mirror, so the cascades is used for high-performance applications.