High-pass filter

Digital biquad filter

Voltage

Engineering

Bandwidth (computing)

Low-pass filter

Telecommunications

Analogue filter

Amplifier

Computer science

Filter (signal processing)

Buffer (optical fiber)

Transistor

Physics

Digital filter

Passband

Electronic engineering

Buffer amplifier

Subthreshold conduction

Band-pass filter

CMOS

Computer vision

Electrical engineering

IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I Regular Papers

This paper develops a compact power-efficient CMOS buffer to operate as a nanopower lowpass biquadratic cell. Unlike other recently reported CMOS biquads with passband gains that are attenuated by the bulk effect, this biquad attains a near 0-dB passband gain without gain compensation. It acquires the same levels of input and output common-mode voltages making it useful for cascade realization of a higher order lowpass filter. To demonstrate the potential application of the proposed biquad, a fourth-order lowpass filter was designed based on the proposed biquad circuit and fabricated in the 0.35-μm CMOS process to serve electrocardiography readout systems. Measurement results show that the filter consumes 4.26-nW static power from a 0.9-V supply providing a 100-Hz cutoff frequency. The prototype chip occupies a silicon area of 0.11 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> and contributes an input-referred noise of 80.5 μV <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">rms</sub> . For a 60-Hz input frequency associated with -50-dB third-order harmonic distortion, a dynamic range of 48.2 dB is achieved. The lowest power supply rejection ratio of 40 dB was obtained at 100 Hz. Compared with the previous state-of-the-art designs in the category of nanopower filters, the proposed filter consumes the least power from the lowest supply voltage.

A Subthreshold Buffer-Based Biquadratic Cell and its Application to Biopotential Filter Design