Design of a tunable frequency CMOS fully differential fourth-order Chebyshev filter

A new fully differential amplifier and a fully differential R-MOSFET-C fourth-order Chebyshev active lowpass filter employing passive resistors and current-steering MOS transistors as variable resistors are proposed. The implementation relies on the tunability of current-steering MOS transistors operating in the triode region which counteract the deviation of resistors in integrated circuit manufacturing technology in order that the cutoff frequency of Chebyshev active filter can be realized accurately tunable. The amplifier is not only with voltage common-mode negative feedback (VCMFB), but also with current common-mode negative feedback (CCMFB), which will benefit for the stability of its DC operating point. A cutoff frequency of 138 kHz fourth-order Chebyshev lowpass filter was designed and fabricated using 3.3 V power supply and 0.35 μm CMOS technology. Chip test results demonstrate better than −68 dB THD with 70 kHz, 2.0V_pp signal, frequency turning range of more than 14,000 from 3 Hz to 420 kHz, chip area of 0.36 mm² and power consumption of 16 mW.     

Ultra low voltage, high performance operational transconductance amplifier and its application in a tunable Gm-C filter

This paper presents an ultra low voltage, high performance Operational Transconductance Amplifier (OTA) and its application to implement a tunable Gm-C filter. The proposed OTA uses a 0.5 V single supply and consumes 60 μw. Employing special CMFF and CMFB circuits has improved CMRR to 138 dB in DC. Using bulk driven input stage results in higher linearity such that by applying a 500 mv_p-p sine wave input signal at 2 MHz frequency in unity gain closed loop configuration, third harmonic distortion for output voltage is −46 dB and becomes −42.4 dB in open loop state for 820 mv_p-p output voltage at 2 MHz. DC gain of the OTA is 47 dB and its unity gain bandwidth is 17.8 MHz with 20 pF capacitance load due to both deliberately optimized design and special frequency compensation technique. The OTA has been used to realize a wide tunable Gm-C low-pass filter whose cutoff frequency is tunable from 1.4 to 6 MHz. Proposed OTA and filter have been simulated in 0.18 μm TSMC CMOS technology with Hspice. Monte Carlo and temperature dependent simulation results are included to forecast the mismatch and temperature effects after fabrication process.     

A 65 mW, 0.4–2.3 GHz Bandpass Filter for Satellite Receivers

A monolithic tunable bandpass filter for satellite receiver front-ends is presented. The center frequency of the bandpass filter can be tuned from 0.4 GHz to 2.3 GHz. The filter is constructed using four transconductor-C poly-phase filter sections and has a 50 dB variable gain range. At 20 dB attenuation and at 30 dB gain the measured 1 dB compression point is –21 dBm and –56 dBm, respectively. Measured input IP3 is –12 dBm. The noise figure is 15 dB at maximum gain. An on-chip I/Q oscillator tracks the center frequency and enables automatic tuning. The bandpass filter dissipates 65 mW with 5 Volt supply voltage and occupies 0.16 mm² chip area. The filter is realized in a standard 11 GHz f _t bipolar technology.     

A low-noise mixer with an image-reject notch filter for 2.4 GHz applications

This paper presents a low noise first down-conversion mixer with a notch filter for the heterodyne receiver. The notch filter connected to the output node of the mixer driver stage plays a role of image rejection at an image frequency, thereby suppressing the sideband image noise and improving the mixer noise performance. Targeted for 2.4 GHz industrial-scientific-medical band applications, a simple source-degenerated down-conversion single balanced mixer with the filter is implemented. The measurement results of the proposed down-conversion mixer shows about 3.0 dB improvement of single-side band noise figure, about 2.9 dB power conversion gain improvement, and 25 dB image suppression compared to those without the filter dissipating 4 mA from a 2.5 V supply voltage.     

RF CMOS active inductor band pass filter with post fabrication calibration

This paper presents an active inductor bandpass filter (BPF) architecture with selectable 50 Ω driving capability and post fabrication calibration for gain, center frequency, and quality factor. The design details, and performance assessment that facilitate selecting an offline calibration mode to measure and tune post fabrication BPF performance are discussed. A specific design example for a L1/L2 channel GPS receiver is included with a BPF that is required to pass the L2 signal centered at 1.227 GHz with a gain of approximately16 dB at the center frequency, have a 3 dB bandwidth of 30 MHz (Q = 41) and rejection of the L1 signal at 1.575 GHz by at least 60 dB relative to the center frequency. A multistage active inductor BPF 90 nm CMOS design is presented that meets these specifications with typical process parameters. It is demonstrated that the post fabrication design based on typical corner analysis can be re-tuned to the desired performance for process variations across the slow and fast corners using the offline measuring and tuning control inputs.     

Digitally assisted neural recording and spike detection multichannel integrated circuit designed in 180 nm CMOS technology

This paper presents design and measurement results of an integrated circuit dedicated to recording and detecting a wide range of biomedical signals. The chip is designed in 180 nm CMOS technology and occupies 1.5×1.5 mm². It consists of 8 channels responsible for amplification, filtration and detection of biomedical signals. In order to satisfy the requirements of a wide range of neurobiological experiments, the main parameters of a single recording channel, such as voltage gain, frequency band, voltage offset and threshold detection, are controlled independently by on-chip digital registers. The recording part is divided into two separate channels, i.e. an Action Potential (AP) stage and a Local Field Potential (LFP) stage. The voltage gain of the AP and LFP stages can be switched between 55.7/50.3 dB and 50.3/45.1 dB respectively. Corner frequencies of a particular stage can be digitally controlled in a wide range, i.e. the upper cut-off frequency can be changed in the 20 Hz–2 kHz (LFP stage) while the lower cut-off frequency can be tuned at the 120 mHz–3 kHz (LFP and AP stage). The upper cut-off frequency of the AP stage is equal to 6.9 kHz. In addition, the area of the analog part of the recording channel is 0.04 mm². A single recording channel is supplied from ±0.9 V and consumes about 4.8 µW of power while the Input Referred Noise is equal to 6.2 µV resulting in 4.92 of Noise Efficiency Factor (NEF).     

The design of wideband and low-power CMOS active polyphase filter and its application in RF double-quadrature receivers

In this work, a new technique to implement the transfer function of polyphase filter with CMOS active components is proposed and analyzed. In the proposed polyphase filter structure, the currents mirrored from capacitors and the transistors in a single-stage are used to realize high-pass and low-pass functions, respectively. The multistage structure expands the frequency bandwidth to more than 20 MHz. Furthermore, a constant-gm bias circuit is employed to decrease the sensitivity of image rejection to temperature and process variations. HSPICE simulations are performed to confirm the performance. With the current-mode operation, the low-voltage version of proposed active polyphase filters was designed. It can be operated at 1-V power supply with similar performance but with only 50% of the power dissipation of the normal-voltage version. The proposed four-stage polyphase filter is fabricated in 0.25-/spl mu/m CMOS 1P5M technology. The measured image rejection ratio is higher than -48 dB at frequencies of 6.1 MHz/spl sim/30 MHz. The measured voltage gain is 6.6 dB at 20 MHz and IIP3 is 8 dBm. The power dissipation is 11 mW at a supplied voltage of 2.5 V and the active chip area is 1162/spl times/813 /spl mu/m/sup 2/.     

High linearity technique for ultra-wideband low noise amplifier in 0.18 μm CMOS technology

A linearization technique for ultra-wideband low noise amplifier (UWB LNA) has been designed and fabricated in standard 0.18 μm CMOS technology. The proposed technique exploits the complementary characteristics of NMOS and PMOS to improve the linearity performance. A two-stage UWB LNA is optimized to achieve high linearity over the 3.1-10.6 GHz range. The first stage adopts inverter topology with resistive feedback to provide high linearity and wideband input matching, whereas the second stage is a cascode amplifier with series and shunt inductive peaking techniques to extend the bandwidth and achieve high gain simultaneously. The proposed UWB LNA exhibits a measured flat gain of 15 dB within the entire band, a minimum noise figure of 3.5 dB, and an IIP3 of 6.4 dBm while consuming 8 mA from a 1.8 V power supply. The total chip area is 0.39 mm², including all pads. The measured input return loss is kept below −11 dB, and the output return loss is −8 dB, from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz.     

A 2.4 GHz CMOS Low-IF Receiver Front-End for WLAN Applications

A CMOS low-IF receiver front-end applied for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) is presented in this paper. The receiver front-end comprises a low noise amplifier (LNA), a down-converter, a single-to-fully converter, a polyphase filter, and a summator/subtractor. This low-IF architecture achieves 0.46° phase error and 0.7 dB gain mismatch in I–Q channels while the 2.4 GHz RF signal is down-converted into 100 MHz of IF band. The cascaded noise figure (NF) of LNA and polyphase network is 4.89 dB within the WLANs' requirement. The chip realized in a 0.6 m CMOS technology occupys 2.4 mm × 2.1 mm active area. From a single 3.3 V power supply, it consumes 300 mW power.     

AN ANTI-ALIASING FILTER FOR ∑△ ADC

An anti-aliasing filter for ΣΔ ADCs using a combination of active RC and analog FIR filters is presented in this letter. The first order active RC filter is set at 100kHz to minimize the die size and variations of linear phase and gain in 0–4kHz passband. The 2-tap FIR filter provides more than −53dB attenuation at 2MHz ±4kHz frequency range. The proposed filter achieved more than −76dB attenuation at sampling frequency with ±0.01° phase linearity and ±0.02dB gain variation within 0–4kHz bandwidth. The active die area of the fully differential filter is 0.17mm² in 0.5μm CMOS technology. The experimental and simulation results have been obtained and the feasibility of the proposed method is shown. Supported by Foundation for University Key Teacher by the Ministry of Education of China     

A 65 nm CMOS fully-integrated dynamic reconfigurable differential power amplifier with high gain in both bands

A fully-integrated dual-band dynamic reconfigurable differential power amplifier with high gain in 65 nm CMOS is presented. A switchable shunt LC network is proposed to implement the dual-band reconfigurable operation and achieve high gain at both low and high frequency bands, and the high quality on-chip transformers are utilized to implement input/output impedance matching and single-ended to differential conversion. Measured results show that the dual-band dynamic reconfigurable power amplifier can provide 23 dB gain at 2.15 GHz and 21 dB gain at 4.70 GHz, and achieve more than 19 dBm saturated output power at 2.15 GHz and 13 dBm saturated output power at 4.70 GHz, respectively. The die area is about 1.7 mm×2.0 mm.     

A process-tolerant out-of-band blocker rejection technique for SAW-less receivers

In this paper, an active filtering technique is presented which is capable of filtering the out-of-band blockers in wireless receivers. The concept is based on the feedforward cancellation technique where a blocker replica is subtracted at the output of the low-noise amplifier (LNA). In contrast to the previously reported feedforward cancellation methods, exact gain and phase matching are easily obtained in the proposed architecture to produce a highly selective narrowband frequency response at the output of the LNA with wide rejection bandwidth. For the proof of concept, the system is implemented in a 65 nm CMOS technology. It occupies a total area of 0.8 mm² and the current consumption is 24 mA from a 1.2 V supply. The system post-layout simulations showed a blocker rejection of more than 33 dB for blocker signals 100 MHz away from the desired signal when the feedforward path is activated. The noise figure (NF) of the entire system is 3.8 dB that degrades to 5.8 dB when the feedforward path is activated.     

A new CMOS wideband low noise amplifier with gain control

In this paper, a new CMOS wideband low noise amplifier (LNA) is proposed that is operated within a range of 470 MHz-3 GHz with current reuse, mirror bias and a source inductive degeneration technique. A two-stage topology is adopted to implement the LNA based on the TSMC 0.18-μm RF CMOS process. Traditional wideband LNAs suffer from a fundamental trade-off in noise figure (NF), gain and source impedance matching. Therefore, we propose a new LNA which obtains good NF and gain flatness performance by integrating two kinds of wideband matching techniques and a two-stage topology. The new LNA can also achieve a tunable gain at different power consumption conditions. The measurement results at the maximum power consumption mode show that the gain is between 11.3 and 13.6 dB, the NF is less than 2.5 dB, and the third-order intercept point (IIP3) is about −3.5 dBm. The LNA consumes maximum power at about 27 mW with a 1.8 V power supply. The core area is 0.55×0.95 mm².     

A low-voltage high-linearity ultra-wideband down-conversion mixer in 0.18-μm CMOS technology

This paper presents a wideband mixer chip covering the frequency range from 3.4 to 6.8 GHz using TSMC 0.18 μm CMOS technology. The linearity can be improved using multiple-gated-transistors (MGTR) topology. The measured 3-dB RF frequency bandwidth is from 3.1 to 6.8 GHz with an IF of 10 MHz. The measured results of the proposed mixer achieve 7.2-4.3 dB power conversion gain and 2-3 dBm input third-order intercept point (IIP3), and the total dc power consumption of this mixer including output buffers is 2.9 mW from a 1 V supply voltage. The current output buffer is about 2.17 mW, and the excellent LO-RF isolation achieved up to 54 dB at 5 GHz. The paper presents a mixer topology that is very suitable for low-power in ultra-wideband system applications.     

Pseudorandom signal sampler for relaxed design of multistandard radio receiver

This paper proposes a novel software defined radio (SDR) receiver design using non-uniform sampling (NUS) technique implemented by original design of a pseudorandom signal sampler (PSS) circuit for controlling data conversion to relax multistandard receiver circuit constraints. The proposed and designed NUS-based SDR receiver allows spectral alias suppression at integer multiples of sampling frequency offering the advantages of relaxing anti-aliasing filter (AAF), reducing the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) dynamic power consumption and the automatic gain control (AGC) range as well. The PSS circuit, generating pseudorandom clock signal, with enough time-quantization accuracy, was designed. The PSS is implemented in 65-nm digital CMOS technology and occupies 470 (μm)². It features up to 200 MHz “mean clock” for 3.2 GHz main clock while drawing 242 μA for 1.2 V supply. Mixed experimental/simulation tests, of designed NUS-based SDR receiver, revealed a confirmation of alias-free performances and the achievement of a 72 dB (12-bit ADC) dynamic range after signal reconstruction.     

A 5.2 mW 240–550 MHz continuous-time low-pass filter and VGA for a UWB receiver in 0.18 μm CMOS process

A very low-power wide-band CMOS continuous-time low-pass filter for a ultra wideband system receiver in 0.18-μm CMOS technology is proposed. The cutoff frequency of the fourth-order LPF can be tuned within 240–550 MHz. The gain of the filter is tuned about 44 dB which can omit the variable gain amplifier (VGA) block. An IIP3 of 17.4 dBm is achieved for a power consumption of 5.2 mW from a 1.8 V power supply. Merging LPF and VGA into one block can efficiently reduce the power consumption and the chip area of the analog baseband channel while achieving a high linearity.     

A novel current reference based on subthreshold MOSFETs with high PSRR

A novel current reference based on subthreshold MOSFETs with high power supply rejection ratio (PSRR) is presented. The proposed circuit takes full advantages of the I-V transconductance characteristics of MOSFET operating in the subthreshold region and the enhancement pre-regulator with the high gain negative feedback loop for the current reference core circuit. The proposed circuit, designed with the SMIC 0.18 μm standard CMOS logic process technology, exhibits a stable current of about 1.701 μA with much low temperature coefficient of 2.5×10⁻⁴ μA/°C in the temperature range of −40 to 150 °C at 1.5 V supply voltage, and also achieves a best PSRR over a broad frequency. The PSRR is about −126 dB at dc frequency and remains −92 dB at the frequency higher 1 MHz. The proposed circuit operates stably at the supply voltage higher 1.2 V and has good process compatibility.     

Dual-band RF receiver for GPS-L1 and compass-B1 in a 55-nm CMOS

A fully integrated dual-band RF receiver with a low-IF architecture is designed and implemented for GPS-L 1 and Compass-Bl in a 55-nm CMOS process. The receiver incorporates two independent IF channels with 2 or 4 MHz bandwidth to receive dual-band signals around 1.57 GHz respectively. By implementing a flexible frequency plan, the RF front-end and frequency synthesizer are shared for the dual-band operation to save power consumption and chip area, as well as avoiding LO crosstalk. A digital automatic gain control （AGC） loop is utilized to improve the receiver＇s robustness by optimizing the conversion gain of the analog-to-digital converter （ADC）. While drawing about 20 mA per channel from a 1.2 V supply, this RF receiver achieves a minimum noise figure （NF） of about 1.8 dB, an image rejection （IMR） of more than 35 dB, a maximum voltage gain of about 122 dB, a gain dynamic range of 82 dB, and an maximum input-referred 1 dB compression point of about -36.5 dBm with an active die area of 1.5 × 1.4 mm2 for the whole chip.     

Design of low power UWB LNA based on common source topology with current-reused technique

This paper presents two low power UWB LNAs with common source topology. The power reduction is achieved by the current-reused technique. The gain and noise enhancement of the proposed circuit is based on an output buffer which is used by a common source amplifier with shunt–shunt feedback. Chip1 is an adopted T-match input network of 50 Ω matching in the required band. Measurements show that the S₁₁ and S₂₂ are less than −10 dB, and the maximum amplifier gain S₂₁ gives 9.7 dB, and the noise figure is 4.2 dB, the IIP3 is −8.5 dBm, and the power consumption is 11 mW from 1.1 V supply voltage. The input matching of chip2 is adopted from a LC high pass filter and source degenerated inductor. The output buffer with the RC-feedback topology can improve the gain, increase the IIP3, restrain the noise, improve the noise figure and decrease the DC power dissipation. Measurements show 13.2 dB of power gain, 3.33 dB of noise figure, and the IIP3 is −3.3 dBm. It consumes 9.3 mW from 1.5 V supply voltage. These two chips are implemented in a 0.18 μm TSMC CMOS process.     

An 863-870 MHz spread-spectrum FSK transceiver design for wireless sensor

Simulation results of a 863-870 MHz frequency-hopped spread-spectrum (FHSS) transceiver with binary frequency shift keying (BFSK) modulation at 20 kb/s for wireless sensor applications is presented.The transmit/receive RF front end contains a BFSK modulator, an upconversion mixer, a power amplifier (PA), and an 863-870 MHz band pass filter (BPF) at the transmitter side and a low-noise amplifier with down conversion mixer to zero-IF, a low-pass channel-select filter, a limiter and a BFSK demodulator at the receiver side. The various block parameters of the transmit/receive RF front end like noise figure (NF), gain, 1 dB compression point (P-1 dB), and IIP3 are simulated and optimized to meet low power and low cost transceiver specifications.The transmitter simulations show an output ACPR (adjacent channel power ratio) of −22 dBc, 3.3 dBm P-1 dB of PA, and transmitted power of 0 dBm. The receiver simulations show 51.1 dB conversion gain, −7 dBm IIP3, −15 dB return loss (S11), and 10 dB NF. Low power arctangent-differentiated BFSK demodulator has been chosen and the BER performance has been co simulated with the analog receiver. The complete receiver achieves a BER of 10⁻³ at 10.5 dB of EbtoNo. The transceiver simulations show an RMS frequency error of 1.45 kHz.