A high performance, high-swing CMOS cascode current mirror operating with 1V power supply voltage and using standard CMOS technology is presented. The present circuit employs PMOS source-coupled pair as voltage level shifter to reduce the power supply voltage requirement. The additional advantages of the use of the source-coupled pair are the improved output resistance and the automatic adaptive biasing, thereby enabling the high-swing of output terminal, when used in the cascode configuration. An analytical discussion of the circuit is carried out and the results are confirmed by SPICE simulation. SPICE simulation results show that the input voltage requirement is 370mV and the minimum output voltage requirement is 273mV at the maximum input current of 40µA, whose requirements decrease with decreasing input currens. The output resistance is shown to be greater than 4MΩ at the maximum output current of 40µA, which increases with decreasing output currents. The -3dB bandwidth is shown to be greater than 400MHz and the total harmonic distortion better than -54.34dB at 100kHz at the maximum peak-to-peak input current swing of 40µA. The present circuit will be useful for the low voltage, low power, high-performance mixed analog/digital signal processing.

A novel circuit design technique for realizing a linear CMOS transconductance element, consisting of an adaptively biased source-coupled differential pair using a quadritail cell, is proposed. In the circuitry, the quadritail cell, which provides an output current proportional to the square of a differential input voltage, cancels a nonlinear term of the source-coupled differential pair. The circuit have a superior linearity and a wide linear input voltage range compared with the conventional linear CMOS transconductance elements because the transconductance characteristic is theoretically linear over wide input voltage range when all the MOS field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) are operating in the saturation region and the MOSFETs' behaviors are according to the relation based on the square-law characteristic. The proposed adaptively biased source-coupled differential pair was verified by using transistorarrays and discrete components on a breadboard.

Circuit design techniques for linearizing adaptively biased differential pairs are described. An emitter-and source-coupled pair is adaptively biased by a squaring circuit to linearize its transconductance, one of whose inputs is divided by resistors. An input signal for a differential pair or a squaring circuit is set to an adequate amplitude by a resistive divider without sacrificing linearity. Therefore, a differential pair is biased by the output current of a squaring circuit and they are coupled directly. There are three design techniques for squaring circuits. One is the transistor-size unbalance technique. Another is the bias offset technique. A third is the multitail technique. The bipolar and MOS squaring circuits discussed in this paper were proposed by the author previously, and consist of transistor-pairs with different transistor size (i.e., the emitter areas or gate W/L values are different), transistor-pairs with the same bias offset, or a multitail cell(i.e., a triple-tail cell or quadritail cell). Several kinds of squaring circuits consisting of such transistor-pairs are applied to produce the quadratic bias currents for compensating the nonlinearity of an emitter-and source-coupled pair. Therefore, four circuits using emitter-coupled pairs with adaptive-biasing current and four circuits using source-coupled pairs with adaptive-biasing current are proposed and analyzed in depth. Furthermore, a circuit configuration for low voltage operation is also introduced and verified with bipolar transistor-arrays on a breadboard.