Towards a new generation of analogue IC design architectures

More mature device technologies such as true complementary silicon bipolar junction (BJT), mixed silicon bipolar and complimentary metal oxide semiconductor devices (BiCMOS) and Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) are becoming available and bring with them the requirement for novel analogue design, methods, techniques and CAD tools necessary for the successful development and exploitation of these technologies for the future market place. Coupled with these technological improvements are the ever shrinking feature size of devices on ICs and the consequential reduction of power supply voltages which has fuelled the creation of `alternative´ analogue design methods. This paper is a review of some of the authors´ work on the design and application of current-mode analogue signal processing techniques and the development of a new generation of high performance analogue circuit and system architectures, with emphasis on high speed