Some developments towards analogue CMOS VLSI design

Recently, the possibility of `real´ analogue VLSI has begun to emerge. A system of this type may be loosely conceived of as a large chip, consisting primarily of high density analogue circuitry with a relatively smaller portion of digital circuitry for memory and control. In order to meet this challenge, it is clearly necessary to have at one´s disposal, realisations for the basic system elements (or cells, e.g. operational amplifiers) which occupy small chip area, have low power consumption and still feature high precision performance. By adopting a firmly bottom-up approach, the authors examine different detailed aspects of analogue IC design which could help to bring the reality of analogue VLSI systems closer. These include continuous-time and discrete-time systems. They focus on minimisation of chip area and power consumption while maintaining high precision performance and consider complex analogue systems including artificial neural networks