Design and simulation of biquadratic filter using

EOTA

Abstract—Based on CMOS technology a wide linear range

transconductor is introduced in this paper. Its transconductance
gain can be tuned linearly by an external bias current of more
than 3 decades (2uA-3mA), but not greater than 2% nonlinearity (1)
for input voltage range of about 1V. This proposed linear tunable
transconductor is used in the realization of electronically tunable
biquad filter. Through LTSPICE simulation results the Where transconductance parameter , is
performance of the circuit is discussed.
the carrier mobility, Cox is the gate oxide capacitance per unit
Keywords— Electronically tunable CMOS OTA (EOTA), area, W is the Channel width, L is the channel length, and VGS
Operational Transconductance Amplifier (OTA), Balanced OTA and VT are gate to source and threshold voltages respectively.

I. INTRODUCTION
In continuous time analog signal processing the tunable
OTA is the important building block. In applications like gm-
C active filters, tunable grounded resistors, automatic gain
control circuits transconductance tuning is essentially
required. Either by varying transconductance as the function
of control voltage or bias current tuning in operational
transconductance amplifier is determined. OTA is called the
tunable OTA if the MOSFET used in it is operating in
saturation or triode region. Their controllable voltage ranges
are rather limited and only narrow linearly transconductance
ranges are there. Since the MOS transistors are operating in
weak-inversion region so the linear tunable transconductance
range is narrow. In case of EOTA which is Electronically
Tunable Operational Transconductance Amplifier, where the
transconductance gain is linearly tuned in wide range, is Figure1: A balanced CMOS OTA with single output
proposed in [2]. But the circuit is complex because it is
composed of three OTA’s and tunable range of less than 2 In the figure single output balanced CMOS OTA which is
decades is obtained. So in this paper new wide linear range used as the fundamental building block in the design of wide
electronically tunable CMOS OTA is proposed where range EOTA is shown. It consists of source coupled pair and
balanced single output CMOS OTA is the significant building three current mirrors. Here Vin is the differential input voltage,
block. EOTA is made up of two OTA’s and an active resistors. io is the differential output current and IBB is the bias current.
As an application example in this paper a CMOS based Here the assumption is made that M1 and M2 are perfectly
electronically tunable voltage mode notch, low-pass and band- matched and M3-M4, M5-M6 and M7-M8 are the three
pass biquad filter is proposed and their frequency responses current mirrors with unity gain. Taking into consideration
are shown in graphs. The circuits are implemented in according to square law of MOS transistors operating in triode
LTSPICE simulation software. If we change the control region, the differential output current is given by
voltage or bias current the transconductance will be varied.
Because of linearity restrictions, the circuit uses voltage as the -
control parameter to change OTA transconductance will have
limited range of operation at low voltages.

II. DESCRIPTION OF CIRCUITS = , for - (2)

A. A balanced single-output CMOS OTA

For the purpose of analysis we will assume that all MOS is the transconductance gain of source coupled pair and is
transistors are operating in saturation region, where formed by differentiating differential output current with
transistor drain current is given by
respect to differential input voltage and transconductance gain
is given by

The OTA2 converts the voltage , with transconductance gain

, for - (3)
of into the output current as

So output current is,

= . (4)
So and , set IBB1=IBB3=IB
B

So from equation (3) we can say that the transconductance

gain is varied by bias current but in the form of square root
function and is also determined that the input-output
characteristics is non-linear.
B. The newly proposed wide linear range EOTA
)

Where is the transconductance gain of Electronically

Tunable CMOS OTA and which is kept constant is given
by

From equation (10) it is indicated that the transconductance

gain of newly determined EOTA can be linearly and
electronically tuned by bias current.

Figure 2: The block diagram of wide range EOTA

(Electronically tunable CMOS OTA)
The OTA1 is used to convert the differential input voltage Vin
into a current which flows through the resistor R, so the
voltage drop across the active resistor R is given by

(5)

Active resistor R is formed by 2 MOS transistors where R is
given by [3].
Figure 3: Schematic diagram of wide range EOTA
From the above schematic diagram of EOTA it is noted that
the multiple output current is got by applying the realization of
current replicas.

Substituting the value of R in equation (5), the voltage drop III. BIQUAD FILTER CONFIGURATION
across resistor R can be rewritten as

2
 EOTA is used to realize biquadratic filter, where the
natural frequency of biquad filter defined by can be tuned
linearly by DC bias current.
Figure 4: CMOS EOTA based voltage mode biquad
configuration (notch, low pass, and band pass filter)
CMOS based electronically tunable voltage mode biquad filter
configuration is constructed using 3 EOTA’s, whereas EOTA3
requires multiple current output which can be configured
using current mirrors formed by transistors M22-M23 as
shown in figure 3 with dashed lines. The transfer function of
the above configuration is given by
Equations (11), (12), (13) represents the transfer function for
notch, low pass and band pass filters.
Here is the natural frequency and Q is the quality factor are
given by
By setting , quality factor is said to
be
Quality factor is determined by setting the capacitance ratio
that is C1 by C2 and the natural angular frequency is tuned by
3
transconductance gain ( ) through the DC bias currents of
EOTA’s. Then the natural angular frequency and quality
factor can be orthogonally tunable.
I. SIMULATION RESULTS
In EOTA, all the MOS transistors are simulated using
CMOS transistor parameters of the SCN2 level 2 of MOSIS
[4] with LTSPICE software. The dimensions of the transistors
M1, M2, M11, M12 are W=40µm, L=10µm and M3-M10,
M13-M23 are W=100µm, L=10µm. The power supply
voltages are set as VDD = -VSS = 5V.
In figure 5, the simulated DC transfer characteristics of
wide linear range EOTA is shown. Here the graph of
differential output current iout versus the input voltage Vin is
shown for different bias currents ( ) of 1mA, 800µA, 600µA.
EOTA is used to linearly convert the input voltage to output
current with non-linearity not greater than 2% for the given
input voltages in the ranges of -1.20V to 1.20V, -1.15V to
1.15V and -1.10V to 1.10V. Suppose if DC bias current is
1mA, Vin = 1.2V, VDD = -VSS = 5V, =0.22V and the
transconductance gain is = 102.4µA/V, so conversion
error is 2%.
The graph of transconductance gain and the bias
current is shown with fixed input voltage of 0.1V and
varying bias current in the range of 1µA to 3mA. It shows that
the transconductance gain is linearly tuned by the bias
current over ranges of 2µA to 3mA and simulated error is
found to be about 1.5%.
Figure 5: DC transfer characteristics of wide range EOTA
Figure 6: The plot of bias current versus transconductance
gain.
Frequency response of EOTA based biquad filters is given in
figure7. The quality factor Q is kept constant with the value of
0.707 by choosing capacitor values C1=1nF and C2=2nF with
power supply voltages VDD = -VSS = 7.5V. The frequency
response graph of biquadratic filters show that for different
values of bias currents = 600µA, 800µA, 1mA, 1.2mA, the
natural frequencies are 4.8kHz, 6.5kHz, 8.0kHz and 9.5kHz
respectively. The calculated natural frequency values from
equation (15) are 4.6kHz, 6.2kHz, 7.7kHz and 9.3kHz. Here
we can see that the simulated values are deviated from the
calculated values with the error of less than 5%. The result
also tells that the cutoff frequency can be linearly tuned by DC
bias currents of EOTA’s, where Q is kept constant.
Figure 7: Frequency response of low pass, band pass and
notch based EOTA biquadratic filters.
V CONCLUSIONS
Electronically tunable CMOS OTA has been proposed in
this paper. Transconductance gain of EOTA can be linearly
tuned by bias current in the range of 2µA to 3mA. The natural
frequency of biquadratic filter can be electronically tuned was
used to tell the performance of the proposed circuits.
References
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Transconductor,” Electronics Letters, vol. 29, no. 5, 1993.
pp.459-461.
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824.
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