Operational amplifiers are important building blocks for analog circuit design. Unfortunately, their limited performance such as bandwidth, slew-rate etc. leads the analog designer to search other possibilites and other building blocks. As a result, new current-mode active building blocks such as operational transconductance amplifiers (OTA), second generation current conveyors (CCII), current-...

This paper describes the experience in teaching integrated circuit design using an educational tool called Microwind through a Project-Based Learning approach. The evolution of the tool in the context of technology scale down is described, with focus on nanoscale technologies. An evaluation of the courses taught in two institutions (INSA France, and UniSA Australia) shows high levels of student...

This paper presents CMOS circuits for integrated analog filters at very high frequencies, based on transconductance-C integrators. First a differential transconductance element based on CMOS inverters is described. With this circuit a linear, tunable integrator for very-high-frequency integrated filters can be made. This integrator has good linearity properties (1% relative gm error for 2-V,, i...

In this paper we propose a design path for optimization-based device sizing of analog circuits. The design path offers an efficient and reliable way to implement high-performance analog integrated circuits without the explicit knowledge of an experienced designer. A key feature is that the partial cost functions are generated directly from the circuit topology. To demonstrate the functionality ...

This paper presents a tutorial treatment of the fundamentals of noise in solid-state analog electronic circuits. It is written for upper division students andpracticing engineers who wish to gain a basic knowledge of the theory of electronic noise and techniques for low-noise circuit design. The paper presents an overview of noise fundamentals, a description of noise models for passive devices ...

Spintronic oscillators are nanodevices that are serious candidates for CMOS integration due to their compactness and easy frequency tunability. For a crystal oscillator to work, there must exist a feedback path with properly What practical circuits do is design such that we have a phase-shift of 180. A double balanced down conversion oscillator mixer using 90 nm CMOS technology is proposed in a...

Optimization of a circuit by transistor sizing is often a slow, tedious and iterative manual process which relies on designer intuition. It is highly desirable to automate the transistor sizing process towards being able to rapidly design high performance integrated circuit. Presented here is a simple but effective algorithm for automatically optimizing the circuit parameters by exploiting the ...

Traditionally, multiple IC chips are needed to build transmitters (Tx) used in wireless communications. The difficulty with a full Tx integration is that each Tx building block uses different technology. A power-detection circuit will exploit the Schottky diode, while the modulator IC is integrated with BiCMOS or SiGe. Likewise, the digital control loop is implemented in CMOS. Now that directco...