Welcome to the website of the DAS Audio team who designed a Class D Audio Amplifier for the VLSI Design Lab course (Spring 2022). In the project, we designed, simulated, verified, taped-out and tested a custom class-D audio amplifier chip using TSMC 65nm technology. The whole project is spread across two semesters with design and tapeout in the spring and testing in the fall semester.

Class-D amplifiers are by now a common circuit widely used in the audio domain. They use transistors as switches instead of as a amplifying stages as in e.g., class-A, class-B or class-AB designs. By doing so, they manage to achieve very high power efficiencies without introducing too much distortion. Hence, they are extremely ubiquitous and be found in nearly every mobile phone.