Variation-aware widely tunable nanoscale design of CMOS active inductor-based RF bandpass filter

Summary This paper presents a novel design methodology for realizing a variation-aware widely tunable active inductor-based RF bandpass filter (BPF). The inductor-less filter is designed and implemented using voltage differencing transconductance amplifier (VDTA) as an active building block and a grounded capacitor, thereby validating its suitability for fully integrated circuit applications. Digital ‘coarse’ tuning and analog ‘fine’ tuning are employed to achieve better frequency coverage. The designed filter exhibits a tuning range of 1.65–3.015 GHz and a 3-dB bandwidth of 1400–122 MHz which translates into a quality factor of 1.17–24.71. It offers a voltage gain of 0–22.91 dB, noise figure of 28.16–28.95 dB, has a 1-dB compression point of 2.50–2.478 dBm and draws 0.065–0.232 mW power from 1-V power supply. Our proposed design shows a figure-of-merit of 82.08–91.27 dB, which is higher as compared to its counterparts available in the literature. The filter is implemented in 45-nm CMOS technology node using metal gate and strained silicon. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.