ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

CMOS amplifier

Okay kiddo, let me explain what a CMOS amplifier is in a way you can understand.

Have you ever played with Legos? Imagine you have two different types of Legos - red and blue ones. Imagine these Legos as tiny switches that can turn on and off electricity. The red ones turn on when you connect them to a power source, and turn off when you disconnect them. The blue ones do the opposite - they turn on when you disconnect them and turn off when you connect them.

Now let's say you want to make something with these Legos that can amplify a small sound to make it louder. You can use the red and blue Legos together to make a circuit that does this. First, you start with a tiny microphone that picks up the sound and converts it into electricity. Then you connect the microphone to a bunch of red Legos that act as amplifiers. These red Legos make the electrical signal bigger.

But remember, the blue Legos switch on when you disconnect them from the power source. We can use that to our advantage. We connect the output of the red Legos to a bunch of blue Legos which act as switches to turn the sound on and off very quickly. This creates a waveform - a pattern of on and off signals - that is a larger version of the small sound that went into the microphone.

Finally, you add some more red Legos to make the waveform even bigger, and you have a CMOS amplifier that can take a small sound and make it much louder.

So in short, a CMOS amplifier is an electronic circuit that uses tiny switches called transistors (the red and blue Legos) to amplify signals and make sounds louder.