Energy efficient transconductor for widely programmable analog circuits and systems

This paper presents a novel transconductor which is widely tunable and reconfigurable to a number of circuit specifications with an adaptive power consumption. Current-starving techniques are combined with programmable output stages so that the output current range and granularity can be arbitrarily set, while increasing energy efficiency with the number of active stages. These characteristics make the proposed circuit very suited to enlarge the autonomy and battery life in a number of portable multi-mode/multi-standard devices, spanning from biomedical applications and mobile phones to wireless sensor networks¹.