A CMOS multi-gain transconductance amplifier and its applications

Transconductance amplifier (g_m) based circuits are attractive due to their inherent programmability features. Single output g_m’s are often replaced by multi-output g_m’s to reduce the number of active devices for a given application. However, this usually results in losing the circuit programmability features. This work shows that this problem can be circumvented through adopting a new programmable multi-gain g_m. The advantages of the proposed multi-gain g_m are demonstrated using two filter design examples. They show that the proposed multi-gain g_m reduces the number of active devices by two-third compared with their single output g_m based counterparts while maintaining their versatile programmability characteristics. Experimental results obtained from a 0.18 μm CMOS process for one of the applications are provided.