Design of Linear CMOS Transconductance Elements for Alpha-Power Law Based Mosfets and an Automatic Compensation Technique for Temperature

A model on alpha-power law MOSFETs based source-coupled differential pair (SCDP) is discussed and a simple design procedure for realizing a linear CMOS SCDP transconductance element is proposed. The proposed or modified SCDP circuit using this procedure is an alternative to that of conventional SCDP and the circuit discussed has superior linearity for a wide range ±(0-300mv) of input differential voltage at a supply voltage of 1.2v. The modified SCDP also includes the circuitry needed to suppress the variation in the quiescent current with respect to input common-mode voltage noise. The SPICE results are used to verify theoretical predictions. The results show close agreement between the predicted model behavior and the simulated performance. The simulated result on Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) shows that the modified SCDP circuit is better than the conventional SCDP by about four times at input differential voltage amplitude of ±100mv. An example circuit, a second order continuous time gm-C band-pass filter is constructed using the fully differential modified SCDP and the fully differential conventional SCDP circuit and the result shows that the modified transconductor circuit is better in linearity (THD) than the conventional SCDP by about two times at the input differential voltage amplitude of ±100mv. An automatic digital compensation scheme for temperature is also presented and the temperature coefficient of output current is reduced by about eight times to 250ppm/deg.C after compensation for the maximum change in temperature of 150deg.C and at the input differential voltage of 100mv.