A highly linear bulk-driven CMOS OTA for continuous-time filters

In this paper we present a bulk-driven CMOS triode-based fully balanced operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) and its application to continuous-time filters. The proposed OTA is linearly tunable with the feature of low distortion and high output impedance. It can achieve wide input range without compromising large transconductance tuning interval. Using a 0.18 mu m n-well CMOS process, we have implemented a third-order elliptic low-pass filter based on the proposed OTA. Both the simulation and measurement results are reported. The total harmonic distortion is more than -45 dB for fully differential input signals of up to 0.8 V peak-peak voltage. A dynamic range of 45 dB is obtained under the OTA noise integrated over 1 MHz.