A 0.9 V Supply OTA in 0.18 μm CMOS Technology and Its Application in Realizing a Tunable Low-Pass Gm-C Filter for Wireless Sensor Networks

A low voltage low power operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) based on a bulk driven cell and its application to implement a tunable Gm-C filter is presented. The linearity of the OTA is improved by attenuation and source degeneration techniques. The attenuation technique is implemented by bulk driven cell which is used for low supply voltage circuits. The OTA is designed to operate with a 0.9 V supply voltage and consumes 58.8 μW power. A 600 mVppd sine wave input signal at 1 MHz frequency shows total harmonic distortion (THD) better than -40 dB over the tuning range of the transconductance. The OTA has been used to realize a tunable Gm-C low-pass filter with gain tuning from 5 dB to 21 dB with 4 dB gain steps, which results in power consumptions of 411.6 to 646.8 μW. This low voltage filter can operate as channel select filter and variable gain amplifier (VGA) for wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. The proposed OTA and filter have been simulated in 0.18 μm CMOS technology. Corner case and temperature simulation results are also included to forecast process and temperature variation affects after fabrication.