Title of Thesis : INFORMATION CAPACITY AND POWER EFFICIENCY IN OPERATIONAL TRANSCONDUCTANCE

Title of Thesis: INFORMATION CAPACITY AND POWER EFFICIENCY IN OPERATIONAL TRANSCONDUCTANCE AMPLIFIERS Suvarcha Malhotra, Master of Science, 2003 Thesis directed by: Professor Pamela A. Abshire Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Information capacity is a fundamental and quantitative bound on the ability of a physical system to communicate information. The capacity depends only on the physical properties of the channel, such as bandwidth, noise, and constraints on the signal values; it does not depend on specific tasks for which the channel may be used. Real analog systems possess intrinsic physical noise such as thermal noise and flicker noise and inevitably suffer degradation of information content. We investigate the information transmission and information-power efficiency of an Operational Transconductance Amplifier (OTA). We present empirical results for the information capacity of an integrated OTA and compare these results with our theoretical model. We notice a significant increase in information content if the system is operated in spectral regions with higher frequency and lower noise level. INFORMATION CAPACITY AND POWER EFFICIENCY IN OPERATIONAL TRANSCONDUCTANCE AMPLIFIERS by Suvarcha Malhotra Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science 2003 Advisory Committee: Professor Pamela A. Abshire, Chair Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings Professor Timothy Horiuchi Professor Elisabeth Smela Copyright by Suvarcha Malhotra 2003