Theory and Design of OTA-C Oscillators with Native Amplitude Limiting

An analog sinusoidal oscillator usually involves some form of amplitude-limiting mechanism. We examine operational-transconductance-amplifier (OTA) nonlinearity as a choice for amplitude limiting and develop a general theory for its use in OTA-capacitor (OTA-C) oscillators. We facilitate our theoretical discussion with an illustrative design example that we fabricated and tested.

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