A low-voltage current conveyor using inverter-based error amplifier and its oscillator application

A low-voltage second-generation current conveyor (CCII) and its oscillator application suitable for portable systems are proposed in the paper. The proposed current conveyor is based on an inverter-based low-voltage error amplifier and a current mirror. There are no on-chip capacitors in the proposed current conveyor, and it can be designed with standard CMOS digital processes and hence will reduce the cost of chip fabrication. Moreover, the architecture of the proposed circuit without cascoded MOSFET transistors is easily designed and suitable for low-voltage operation. The CCII could be operated in a very low supply voltage such as ±0.5V. The proposed CCII has been fabricated with TSMC 0.18μm CMOS process and applied to low-voltage CCII oscillator suitable for portable systems.