A Low-Power Tunable Square-Wave Generator for Instrumentation Applications

Abstract

In this article, a low-power fully on-chip tunable amplitude and frequency waveform generator (WFG) is proposed. In the proposed architecture, frequency and amplitude are tuned by varying the currents in the respective branches. The waveform generator is designed and fabricated in the United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) 180-nm CMOS process technology with a 1.8-V supply. It generates a square wave of 50% duty cycle, and the output is symmetric with respect to the common-mode voltage. The measured results show tuning of amplitude from 500 mVpp to 1.15 Vpp and frequency from 50 to 650 kHz approximately. It consumes $620~\mu \text {W}$ of power while occupying 0.03-mm2 silicon area only, making it suitable for low-power integrated system applications.