A chopper-stabilized source follower coupling based low-pass filter with noise reduction

Abstract

A highly compact source follower coupling based low-pass filter (LPF) topology is proposed that synthesizes a 3rd-order low-pass transfer function in a single stage with no use of operational amplifiers. Chopper stabilization technique is utilized to reduce 1/f noise for minimizing the in-band integrated noise. Implemented and simulated in a 0.18 μm CMOS process, the 3rd-order LPF achieves a − 3 dB bandwidth of 20 MHz with a 280 μA total current from a 1.4 V supply voltage, defining a power-per-pole/bandwidth efficiency of 6.5 μW/MHz. The output noise density at low frequencies is largely reduced with chopper stabilization technique. The integrated output noise from 10 kHz to 2 MHz is minimized from 22.47 to 7.04 μVrms, with a 10.1 dB improvement. The averaged output noise density over the filter bandwidth is 9.4 nV/√Hz, which is mostly contributed by thermal noise of transistors.