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A "Divide And Conquer" Technique For Implementing Wide Dynamic Range Continuous-Time Filters, Yorgos Palaskas, Yannis Tsividis, Vladimir I. Prodanov, Vito Boccuzzi

Electrical Engineering

This paper presents a technique for implementing analog filters with wide dynamic range and low power dissipation and chip area. The desired dynamic range of the filter is divided into subranges, each covered by a different filtering path optimized specifically for this subrange. This results in small admittance levels for the individual filtering paths and correspondingly small power dissipation and chip area. The system provides undisturbed output during range switching, contrary to conventional automatic gain control (AGC)/filter arrangements that generate disturbances every time the gain of the AGC changes. We also report on a low-noise highly linear CMOS transconductor useful …