Chapter 8

CONCLUSION and FUTURE WORK

8.1 Conclusion
Two variants of Continuous-time reconfigurable gm-C ladder baseband filter with cutoff frequency of 19.77MHz are designed and compared. This cutoff frequency, as stated in literature, is optimum for WLAN. The filters provide 5th order Chebyshev response. For active implementation of gm- c filters, a highly linear transconductor called Tunable OTA with Cascode current mirrors has been designed. Linearization scheme used in the transconductor is based on the cascade of two balanced OTAs through an active resistor. This architecture removes the intrinsic nonlinearity of the balanced OTA and makes the transconductance of the OTA linearly controllable by its tail bias current. But in literature, balanced OTA is implemented using simple current mirrors which have limitation of copying currents. This limitation has been overcome, using cascode current mirrors in place of simple current mirrors. Also the gain of the OTA has been increased by using cascode current mirrors. Also the simulation results show appreciable improvement in terms of gain, CMRR, PSRR and power consumption.

Tunable OTA with cascode current mirror designed in the present work operates from 1.5 V power supplies with a bias tail current (IB) of 1mA with a Power consumption of 9mW. It has a DC gain of 40 dB, GBW of 600MHZ, CMRR of 85 dB , PSRR of 71 dB, and Slew rate of 1.67V/ns (@ CL = 0.5 pF). This OTA achieves a 4.25 mS transconductance at IB of 1mA with a gm tuning range of 1mS to 4.25 mS. With the reduced value of tail bias current (IB = 0.4 mA), DC gain, CMRR, PSRR of the OTA get improved to 44 db, 95.11 dB, 74.59 dB respectively. But GBW, Slew rate and transconductance of the OTA get reduced to 235 MHz, 0.64 V/ns (@ CL = 0.5 pF) and 2.557 mS as these properties depend on IB positively.

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But the power consumption gets reduced to 3.6mW, which can be important for low power applications.

First variant of the filter is designed with the proposed OTA at 1mA bias current. It gives a DC gain of -6 dB with pass band ripples of 1.04 dB and 104 dB/decade gain transition band roll-off. Cutoff Tuning Range is 1.6 MHz to 20 MHz. It consumes total 17 mA bias current. The second variant of the filter is designed with the proposed OTA at 0.4mA tail bias current. As the GBW of the OTA get decreased the Q of the filter increases abruptly from its LCR prototype. It has been proved analytically through simulations. This second variant of the filter shows same DC gain with pass band ripples of 1.64 dB and 118 dB/decade gain transition band roll-off with the Cutoff Tuning Range of 2.52 MHz to 31.66 MHz. It consumes total 6.8 mA bias current. Thus this variant of the filter consumes considerably less power as compared to the first variant. When the temperature varies from 15o to 65oC, the variations of cutoff frequency of the filter is about 5MHz. Temperature Independent biasing circuits with negative feedback tuning are used for temperature compensation. The tuning circuit utilizes a gilbert cell, a capacitor, a transconductance cell and an additional primary biquad Low Pass filter circuit.

8.2 Future work

Baseband filter is an important building block in transceiver architecture. Continuous effort has been made to improve the performance of the filter. Filters designed with high linearity and low power consumption with a wide tuning range will always be a challenge task in the future. The techniques presented this work are only part of the work for WLAN and can be optimized to meet future application.

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