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Extremely Low-Voltage Bulk-Driven Tunable Transconductor

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Abstract

A design solution for bulk-driven tunable transconductor capable of working under extremely low supply/consumption with rail-to-rail input common-mode range is presented in this work. The proposed transconductor topology consists of six bulk-driven CMOS inverters, and it uses a very simple biasing circuit for the transconductance tuning. The design robustness was verified for 0.5 and 0.25 V power supplies offering the advantages of the current-controlled input transconductance. For 0.5 V power supply, the proposed transconductor has 0.075–10.2 \(\upmu \hbox {S}\) transconductance tuning range, input-referred intercept point IP3 = 1.81 V, and 4.62 MHz bandwidth for 3 \(\upmu \hbox {A}\) current consumption. The design robustness of the tunable transconductor was verified by means of computer simulation using triple-well 0.18 \(\upmu \hbox {m}\) CMOS process.

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Acknowledgments

Research described in this paper was financed by the National Sustainability Program under Grant LO1401 and by the Czech Science Foundation under Grant No. P102-15-21942S. For the research, infrastructure of the SIX Center was used.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Microelectronics, Brno University of Technology, Technická 10, Brno, Czech Republic

    Fabian Khateb

  2. Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, nám. Sítná 3105, Kladno, Czech Republic

    Fabian Khateb

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering, Technical University of Częstochowa, 42-201, Czestochowa, Poland

    Tomasz Kulej

  4. Electronics Laboratory, Physics Department, University of Patras, Patras, Greece

    Spyridon Vlassis

Authors
  1. Fabian Khateb
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  2. Tomasz Kulej
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  3. Spyridon Vlassis
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Correspondence to Fabian Khateb.

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Khateb, F., Kulej, T. & Vlassis, S. Extremely Low-Voltage Bulk-Driven Tunable Transconductor. Circuits Syst Signal Process 36, 511–524 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-016-0329-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-016-0329-0

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