A wide tuning range 4 th-order Gm-C elliptic filter for wideband multi-standards GNSS receivers

A 4 th order Gm-C elliptic low-pass filter with a wide continuous tuning range is presented. The continuous tuning is achieved by means of a new tuning circuit which adjusts the bias current of the Gm cell’s input stage to control the cut-off frequency. With this tuning circuit, power efficiency is achieved by scaling down the power consumption proportionally to the cut-off frequency while keeping the linearity near constant over a wide range of frequencies. To extend the tuning range of the filter, Gm switching was employed which also acts on the Gm cell’s input stage without adding any switches in the signal path. The filter was fabricated using UMC 180-nm CMOS technology on an active area of 0.23 mm2. Its cut-off frequency ranges continuously from 7.4 to 27.4 MHz. This wide range of possible tuning makes the filter suitable for modern wideband GNSS signals in zero-IF receivers. The filter consumes 2.1 and 7.5 mA (from 1.8 V) at its lowest and highest cut-off frequencies, respectively, and achieves a high input IP3 of up to -1.3 dBVRMS.