A 1.2V, 10MHz, low-pass Gm-C filter with Gm-cells based on triode-biased MOS and passive resistor in 0.

13m CMOS technology

Jun-Gi Jo, Changsik Yoo, Chunseok Jeong, Chan-Young Jeong, Mi-Young Lee, and Jong-Kee Kwon

Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul 133-791, Korea Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Daejeon 305-350, Korea

Abstract
A 1.2V 10MHz low-pass Gm-C filter implemented with low-voltage Gm-cell based on passive resistor and trioderegion MOSFET is described. The Gm-cell converts the input voltage to the output current by passive resistor for wider signal swing. For low-voltage operation, triode-region MOS transistors are widely used while the output resistance is improved by regulated gate cascode circuit. The 10MHz lowpass Gm-C filter was implemented in a 0.13m CMOS technology and the measured input third order intercept point is 3dBV and 9.5dBV, respectively for in-band and out-ofband input.

the Gm-cell is improved by regulated gate cascode circuits. The detailed description of the proposed Gm-cell will be given in the following sections. The Gm-cell has been applied to a third-order Butterworth low-pass Gm-C filter to verify its performance and the measured results of the filter will also be given.

I. Introduction
The scaling of CMOS technology is driven by the requirement of lower price-per-performance for digital circuitry because the area and power consumption of digital circuitry for a given performance can be much smaller with scaled CMOS technology. For low-cost system, analog function would ideally be integrated on the same die as digital circuitry. Analog design, however, becomes much more challenging with scaled technology due to the lowered supply voltage and the decreased allowable signal swing [1]. The performance requirement on analog circuits is ever increasing with the rapidly improving computing power of digital circuitry, aggravating the situation. For these reasons, it is a challenging task to design a lowvoltage and high-frequency analog filter with scaled CMOS technology. Although Gm-C filter is considered to be most suited architecture for high-frequency operation among various types of analog filters, the linearity and frequency response of transconductance (Gm) cell becomes poor very rapidly with lowered supply voltage [2-5]. In this paper, a low-voltage and high-frequency Gm-cell is proposed which is developed to maximize the dynamic range under lowered supply voltage (1.2V for 0.13m standard CMOS technology). The voltage-to-current conversion is performed by a passive resistor for wider signal swing. The voltage across the passive resistor is kept to be proportional to the input signal by connecting one of the terminals of the resistor to VDD and maintaining the potential of the other terminal to be equal to the input voltage by a feedback. For low-voltage operation, MOS transistors operating in the triode region are widely used while the output resistance of

(a)

Acmfb

(b)

Fig. 1. (a) Conventional low-voltage Gm-cell based on trioderegion MOS transistor and (b) its maximum signal swing.

II. Conventional Triode-MOS Based Gm-Cell

The low-voltage Gm-cell proposed in this paper has been evolved from the conventional Gm-cell based on MOS transistors operating in the triode region shown in Fig. 1-(a). This type of triode MOS based Gm-cells have been widely used for low-voltage operation because of its large dynamic range even with low supply voltage [2-3]. The recently reported low-pass Gm-C filer with Gm-cells of the same basic structure as in Fig. 1-(a) has achieved 10MHz cut-off frequency and 16.3dBm input-third-order intercept point (iIP3) under 1.8V supply voltage [3]. With the supply voltage of 1.2V (nominal recommended supply voltage for standard 0.13m CMOS technology), however, the Gm-cell in Fig. 1-(a) has a very narrow allowable signal swing. As illustrated in Fig. 1-(b), the common-mode level of the signals is desirably VDD/2 and the minimum possible input voltage is Vdn+Vtn (Vtn : the threshold voltage of nMOS transistors) because the transistor M1 must

stay in the triode region. Since the signal swing should be symmetrical along the common-mode level, the maximum input voltage is VDDVdnVtn. The threshold voltage of nMOS transistors is about 0.4V for the 0.13m CMOS technology used in this work. If we assume Vdn is 0.1V (for low-voltage operation, it is desirable to set Vdn as low as possible), the maximum and minimum signal levels of the Gm-cell in Fig. 1-(a) are 0.5V and 0.7V, respectively and thus the allowed signal swing is only 0.2Vpp. Therefore, the conventional triode-MOS based Gm-cell in Fig. 1 would have very poor linearity performance. For a given technology (for a given VDD and Vtn), the only way to have wider signal swing is to have smaller value of Vdn. But because Vdn directly determines the transconductance of the Gm-cell, we cannot use arbitrarily small value of Vdn. This limited signal swing is due to the fact that the input signal is directly connected to the gate of the voltage-tocurrent converting transistor operating in the triode region.

The capacitance of C1 and C2 must be considered as a part of load capacitance when implementing a filter. Because the Gm-cell is a pseudo-differential circuit, the common-mode variation of the input signals is not rejected and thus the common-mode feedforward network consisting of Rcmff, M13, M14, M23, and M24 is employed as well. The current (Vin1Vin1b)/2Rcmff through the feedforward resistors is added to the output current. The differential output current is now given as ;
1 1 iout = N + R R cmff {(Vin1 Vin1b ) + (Vin 2 Vin 2 b )}

(1)

and therefore the transconductance is N(1/R+1/Rcmff). By configuring the resistor R as a resistor array, variable transconductance can be obtained, giving tunability to Gm-C filter.

III. Proposed Triode-Biased MOS and Passive Resistor Based Low-Voltage Gm-Cell
The proposed low-voltage Gm-cell shown in Fig. 2 has much wider signal swing than the conventional one by separating the input signal from the gate of the MOS transistor (M1) in the triode region. The Gm-cell has two input pairs to facilitate the design of a filter. The transistors M1, M3, M5, M7, M10, M12, M13, M14, M15, M17, M19, M21, M23, and M24 are in the triode region while the other transistors are in the saturation region. A. Operation Principle The voltage-to-current conversion is performed by the passive resistor R for wider signal swing. *The voltage level of the lower terminal of the resistor (upper left one) is kept to be equal to the input voltage by the feedback network consisting of M1, M2, A1, and A2. Thus, the voltage across the resistor is VDDVin1 and the current through the resistor R, M1, and M2 is (VDDVin1)/R. Because the drain voltages of the transistors M1 and M3 are all equal to Vdn and their gate voltages are same, the drain current of M1, (VDDVin1)/R, is copied to the transistor M3. It can be thought the transistors M1 and M3 in the triode region constitute a current mirror with their drain voltages being forced to be equal by the feedback. The current flowing through the transistor M1 is not connected to output and therefore wasted. Thus, the (W/L) ratio of the transistor M3 is made N times larger than that of M1 in order to minimize the wasted current in M1. The common-mode level of the differential output is stabilized by the common-mode feedback network consisting of M9-M12, A7, A8, and Acmfb. The capacitors C1 and C2 provide a high-frequency path in the common-mode feedback network, improving the common-mode feedback stability.
*

Fig. 2. Low-voltage Gm-cell where the voltage-to-current conversion is performed by passive resistor. B. Allowable Signal Swing Now, lets derive the allowed signal swing of the proposed Gm-cell with 1.2V supply voltage. The drain voltage Vdn of M1 is assumed to be 0.1V as in the conventional Gm-cell of Fig. 1 for fair comparison. By proper sizing, the minimum required drain-to-source voltage Vds,sat,M2 for the transistor M2 to stay in the saturation region is set to be 0.2V. Then, the input signal can swing down to 0.3V (Vds,sat,M2+Vdn) and up to 0.9V (VDDVds,sat,M2Vdn). Therefore, the allowed signal swing

The explanation is given for the upper-left part of the Gm-cell, that is, for the input Vin1, but can be generalized for the other inputs.

is 0.6Vp-p which is three times larger than that of the conventional low-voltage Gm-cell in Fig. 1-(a). Another difference from the conventional one is that the value of Vdn can now be chosen without any concern on the transconductance. The above derivation is assuming the input transistor M1 stays in the triode region. If the (W/L) ratio of the transistor M1 is sufficiently large so its gm be large enough and thereby its gate voltage need not be modulated too much for large input swing, the above assumption is valid. For the proposed Gm-cell, the (W/L) ratio of the transistor M1 can be chosen to be sufficiently large without affecting the transconductance of the Gm-cell because the (W/L) ratio of the transistor has no effect on the transconductance. The transconductance is solely determined by the resistor R.
1.2

IV. Third-Order Butterworth Filter

In order to verify the functionality and performance of the proposed triode-MOS and passive resistor based low-voltage Gm-cell, a fully differential third-order low-pass Butterworth filter shown in Fig. 4 has been implemented. The filter topology is derived from a doubly terminated LC-ladder prototype and all the Gm-cells have the same transconductance. With the dual-input Gm-cell, the number of Gm-cells can be reduced, which saves chip area and power consumption. The very first Gm-cell has two times the effective transconductance by having two input pairs shorted together to compensate for the inherent 6dB loss in the passband of a doubly terminated LC-ladder filter. The magnitudes of the load capacitors are determined by taking the parasitic capacitance and common-mode feedback path stabilizing capacitors (C1 and C2 in Fig. 2) into account.

Differential output current [mA]

0.6

Vin
-0.6

+ + + +

+ +

+ + +

+ + + Vout

-1.2 -0.9

-0.6

-0.3 0 0.3 Differential input voltage [V]

0.6

0.9

(a)

Fig. 4. Third-order Butterworth filter implemented with the Gm-cell in Fig. 2.

1.1

0.9

Capacitors

0.7

0.5

0.3

-0.9

-0.6

-0.3 0 0.3 Differential input voltage [V]

0.6

0.9

(b) Fig. 3. Simulated (a) voltage-to-current transfer characteristic and (b) transconductance. The Gm-cell was simulated for different values of R with the HSPICE. Fig. 3-(a) shows the voltage-to-current transfer characteristic and the transconductance is plotted in Fig. 3-(b). The transconductance can be varied from 0.65mA/V to 1.18mA/V.

Fig. 5. Microphotograph of the third-order Butterworth filter.

V. Experimental Results
The third-order Butterworth filter built with the lowvoltage Gm-cell of Fig. 2 has been implemented in a 0.13m standard CMOS technology whose microphotograph is in Fig. 5. The active area of the filter is 0.9mm0.6mm. Because the current design is to verify the low-voltage Gm-cell, automatic

Capacitors

Gm-cells

frequency tuning circuit is not included. The current design is focusing on low-voltage operation and not optimized for low-power consumption and therefore the filter dissipates somewhat large power of 22mW under 1.2V supply voltage. The power consumption would be greatly reduced if the transconductance of the Gm-cells and load capacitance of the integrators are optimized. The measured frequency characteristic of the filter is shown in Fig. 6 when the transconductance of the Gm-cell is manually set so the 3dB cut-off frequency is 10MHz. The loss of 1.6dB at passband is due to the non-ideal frequency response of the active baluns at the input and output of the filter which are implemented with operational amplifiers. Fig. 7 shows the two-tone test results for both in-band and out-of-band inputs. For in-band test, two tones at 2MHz and 3MHz are applied and the measured input third-order intercept point (iIP3) is 3dBV. The out-of-band iIP3 is 9.5dBV which is measured with two tones at 20MHz and 35MHz.

Solid-State Circuits Conf., pp. 99-102, 2004. [5] B. Guthrie, T. Sayers, A. Spencer, and J. Hughes, A CMOS gyrator low-IF filter for a dual-mode Bluetooth / ZigBee transceiver, Proc. Custom Integrated Circuits Conf., pp. 49-52, 2004. [6] U. Yodprasit and C. Enz, A 1.5V 75dB dynamic range third-order Gm-C filter integrated in a 0.18m standard digital CMOS process, IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 38, No. 7, pp. 1189-1197, Jul. 2003.

VI. Conclusion
A low-voltage and high-frequency Gm-cell is proposed whose voltage-to-current conversion is performed by a passive resistor for good linearity. For low-voltage operation, MOS transistors operating in the triode region are widely used while the output resistance of the Gm-cell is improved by regulated gate cascode circuit. The proposed low-voltage Gm-cell is applied to a third-order low-pass Butterworth filter implemented in a 0.13m standard CMOS technology.

Acknowledgments
A part of this work was supported by the System IC 2010 Research Project and the Human Resource Development Project for IT SoC Key Architect funded by the Ministry of Information and Communication, Korea. The CAD tools were provided by IDEC.

Fig. 6. Measured frequency response of the filter. The result shows about 1.6dB loss in the passband due to the active baluns at input and output of the measurement setup.

In-band iIP3 = 3dBV

References
[1] A. J. Annema, B. Nauta, R. van Langevelde, and H. Tuinhout, Analog circuits in ultra deep submicron CMOS, IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 132-143, Jan. 2005. [2] C. Yoo, S.-W. Lee, and W. Kim, A 1.5-V, 4-MHz CMOS continuous-time filter with a single-integrator based tuning, IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 18-27, Jan. 1998. [3] Y.-H. Kim, J.-W. Park, M.-Y. Park, and H.-K. Yu, A 1.8V triode-type transconductor and its application to a 10MHz 3rd-order Chebyshev low pass filter, Proc. Custom Integrated Circuits Conf., pp. 53-56, 2004. [4] S. Hori, T. Maeda, N. Matsuno, and H. Hida, Low-power widely tunable Gm-C filter with an adaptive DC-blocking triode-based MOSFET transconductor, Proc. European
Out-of-band iIP3 = 9.5dBV

Fig. 7. Measured third-order input intercept point (iIP3) for in-band (with two tones at 2MHz and 3MHz) and out-of-band (with two tones at 20MHz and 35MHz) inputs.