Variation-aware widely tunable nanoscale design of CMOS active inductor-based RF bandpass filter

摘要

This paper presents a novel design methodology for realizing a variation-aware widely tunable active inductor-based RF bandpass filter (BPF). The inductor-less filter is designed and implemented using voltage differencing transconductance amplifier (VDTA) as an active building block and a grounded capacitor, thereby validating its suitability for fully integrated circuit applications. Digital coarse' tuning and analog fine' tuning are employed to achieve better frequency coverage. The designed filter exhibits a tuning range of 1.65-3.015GHz and a 3-dB bandwidth of 1400-122MHz which translates into a quality factor of 1.17-24.71. It offers a voltage gain of 0-22.91dB, noise figure of 28.16-28.95dB, has a 1-dB compression point of 2.50-2.478dBm and draws 0.065-0.232mW power from 1-V power supply. Our proposed design shows a figure-of-merit of 82.08-91.27dB, which is higher as compared to its counterparts available in the literature. The filter is implemented in 45-nm CMOS technology node using metal gate and strained silicon. Copyright (c) 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.