Current Conveyor: Novel Universal Active Block

Indu Prabha Singh1*, Kalayan Singh2 and S.N. Shukla3

ABSTRACT This paper describes the current conveyors used as a basic building block in a variety of electronic circuit in instrumentation and communication systems. Today these systems are replacing the conventional Op-amp in so many applications such as active filters, analog signal processing, and converters. A detailed study is presented here for its applications. Keywords : Current conveyors, communication systems, conventional Op-amp, active filters.

I. INTRODUCTION amplifier applications. HE current-conveyor, published in 1968 [1], rep- The current conveyor is receiving considerable Tresented the first building block intended for cur- attention as they offer analog designers some signifi- rent signal processing. In 1970 appeared the enhanced cant advantages over the conventional op-amp. These version of the current-conveyor: the second-genera- advantages can be pointed out as follows: tion current-conveyor CCII [2]. They used high qual-  Improve AC performance with better linearity. ity PNP - NPN transistors of a like polarity and match  Wider and nearly constant bandwidth indepen- each other but difference in current gain reduced the dent of closed loop gain. circuit accuracy. This is due to the base current error.  Relatively High slew rate (typically 2000V/?s). The other current conveyor was devised in 1984 by  Flexibility of driving current or voltage signal G. Wilson [3] where another current-mirror configu- output at its two separate nodes, hence suit- ration; known as Wilson current mirror was employed. able for current and voltage mode devices. It consists of an operational amplifier and external  Reduced supply voltage of integrated circuits. PNP transistors. A second generation current con-  Accurate port transfer ratios equal to unity hence veyor (CCII) was presented in 1990 using an opera- employed in low sensitivity design. tional amplifier and external CMOS transistors [4].  Requirement of smaller number of passive com- Both circuits were subject to the OP-AMP perfor- ponents to perform a specific function. mance and again to the transistor mismatching. Dur- In 1988 the principle of a MOS current copier ing that time, research societies started to notice that was presented [7], which enabled analogue circuit the voltage-mode operational amplifier is not neces- designers to design different Current Conveyors us- sarily the best solution to all analogue circuit design ing only MOS-transistors. Therefore, apart from problems. New research findings regarding current- above advantages following are the driving force be- mode signal processing using current-conveyors were hind the development of MOS Current Conveyor: presented. Furthermore, a commercial product be-  Analog VLSI addresses almost all real world came available: the current-feedback operational problems and finds exciting new information amplifier [5, 6]. The high slew rate and wide band- processing applications in variety of areas such width of this amplifier resulted in its popularity in video as integrated sensors, image processing, speech

1 * Indu Prabha Singh, is Associate Professor, at Sarawswati Institute of Technology and Management, Unnao (GB Technical University, Lucknow). 2 Kalyan Singh, is Professor, at Dr. Ram Manohar Lohiya Avadh University, Faizabad. 3 S. N. Shukla is Reader, at Dr. Ram Manohar Lohiya Avadh University, Faizabad. 41 copyright samriddhi, 2010 S-JPSET, Vol. 1, Issue 1 Current Conveyor: Novel Universal Active Block recognition, hand writing recognition etc [5]. where A, B, C assume a value either 1, 0 or - 1 The need for low-voltage low-power circuits and RX is the intrinsic resistance offered by the port is immense in portable electronic equipments X to the input currents. For an ideal CC VX = VY like laptop computers, pace makers, cell and the input resistance (RX) at port X is zero (equa- phones etc. Voltage Mode Circuits are rarely tion (1)). But in practical CCs, RX is a nonzero posi- used in low-voltage circuits as the minimum bias tive value. voltages depend on the threshold voltages of The commonly used block representation of a CC the MOSFETs. However, in current mode cir- is shown in Figure 1, where X and Y are the input cuits (CMCs), the currents decide the circuit terminals and Z is the output terminal. operation and enable the design of the systems that can operate over wide dynamic range.  MOS-transistors in particular are more suitable for processing currents rather than voltages because the output signal is current both in common-source and common-gate amplifier configurations. Common-drain amplifier configuration is almost useless at low supply voltages because of the bulk-effect present in Fig. 1: General Current Conveyor Symbol typical CMOS-processes. A. First Generation Current- Conveyor CCI  MOS current-mirrors are more accurate and The first generation current conveyor CCI forces less sensitive to process variation. Therefore, both the currents and the voltages in ports X and Y to MOS-transistor circuits should be simplified by be equal and a replica of the currents is mirrored (or using current signals in preference to voltage conveyed) to the output port Z. Port Y is used as signals. For this reason, integrated current- input for voltage signals and it should not load the mode system realizations are closer to the tran- input voltage source by drawing current. But, in some sistor level than the conventional voltage-mode applications, it is desirable to draw currents from the realizations. input voltage source. When A = 1, port Y draws a When signals are widely distributed as voltages, current equal to the current injected at port X and the the parasitic capacitances are charged and discharged configuration is termed as CCI. with the full voltage swing, which limits the speed and Figure 2 presents a simple MOS implementation increases the power consumption of voltage-mode of the first generation current-conveyor CCI. In this circuits. Current-mode circuits cannot avoid nodes circuit, the NMOS transistors M1 and M2 form a with high voltage swing either but these are usually current mirror that forces the drain currents of the local nodes with less parasitic capacitances. There- PMOS transistors M3 and M4 to be equal and hence fore, it is possible to reach higher speed and lower the voltages at the terminals X and Y are forced to be dynamic power consumption with current-mode cir- identical. cuit techniques. Current-mode interconnection circuits in particular show promising performance. II. BASIC CURRENT CONVEYOR A CC is a three or more port (X, Y, Z) network. Whose input-output relationship is given by:

Fig. 2: simple MOS implementation of the first generation current-conveyor CCI

42 S-JPSET, Vol. 1, Issue 1 copyright samriddhi, 2010 Indu Prabha Singh, Kalayan Singh and S.N. Shukla Because of this low impedance at the input termi- a current output, the X-terminal can be used both as nal CCI circuit can be used as an accurate current a voltage output and as a current input. Therefore, amplifier. In addition, the DC-voltage level at the cur- this conveyor can easily be used to process both current input X can be easily set to a desired value by rent and voltage signals unlike the first generation cur- the voltage at the Y-terminal and input voltage-to-current-conveyor or the operational amplifier. rent conversion is easier .It can also be used as a A further enhancement to the second generation negative impedance converter (NIC) [12], if the Y- current-conveyor is that there are two types of con- terminal is terminated with a grounded resistance R. veyors: in the positive current-conveyor CCII+, the The impedance at the terminal X equals. currents ix and iz have the same direction as in a current-mirror and in the negative current-conveyor CCII-the currents ix and iz have opposite direction as in a current buffer. The second-generation current- conveyor is in principle a voltage-follower with a voltage input, Y, and a voltage output, X, and a current- follower (or current-inverter) with a current input X and a current output Z connected together (Figure B. Second Generation Current Conveyor CCII 3). The negative second-generation current-conveyor In many applications, only one of the virtual CCII- can also be considered an idealised MOS- grounds in terminals X and Y of the first generation transistor, where the currents iy =ig =0 and iz =id = - current-conveyor is used and the unused terminal must ix = - is and the voltages vx = vs = vy = vg. An ideal be grounded or otherwise connected to a suitable MOS transistor is one that has a zero threshold volt- potential. This grounding must be done carefully since age Vt and zero channel length modulation param- a poorly grounded input terminal may cause unwanted eter ? and operates in the saturation region regard- negative impedance at the other input terminal. More- less of the drain-source voltage (positive or negative). over, for many applications a high impedance input C. Third Generation Current Conveyor CCIII terminal is preferable. For these reasons, the second Current-conveyor III was proposed in 1995 [9]. generation current-conveyor was developed. It has The operation of the third generation current-conveyor one high and one low impedance input rather than the CCIII is similar to that of the first order current-con- two low impedance inputs of the CCI [2]. veyor CCI, with the exception that the currents in ports X and Y flow in opposite directions (A= -1). As the input current flows into the Y-terminal and out from the X-terminal, the CCIII has high input impedance with common-mode current signals, i.e. identical currents are fed both to Y- and X-terminals. There- fore common-mode currents can push the input terminals out from the proper operation range. There- fore this conveyor is used as current probing. III. CURRENT-FEEDBACK OPERATIONAL Fig. 3: The principle of the second generation current- conveyors. AMPLIFIER (a) The positive conveyor CCII+, iz = ix. The current-feedback operational amplifier is posi- (b) The negative conveyor CCII-, iz =- ix. tive second generation current-conveyor CCII+ with an additional voltage buffer at the conveyor current This current-conveyor differs from the first gen- output (5, 7, 8). The non-inverting port (Y) exhibits eration conveyor in that the terminal Y is a high im- high impedance to voltage signals where as the in- pedance port, i.e. there is no current flowing into Y(A verting port (X) present low impedance to the input = 0). The Y-terminal of the second generation cur- current signals. The current at the inverting input (X) rent-conveyor is a voltage input and the Z-terminal is of the current-feedback operational amplifier is trans- 43 copyright samriddhi, 2010 S-JPSET, Vol. 1, Issue 1 Current Conveyor: Novel Universal Active Block ferred to the high impedance current-conveyor out- where Zt is the transimpedance of the internal cur- put Z, causing a large change in output voltage. The rent-feedback operational amplifier. current-feedback operational amplifier has a transresistance equal to the impedance level at the conveyor Z-output. Therefore, in the literature, the current-feedback operational amplifier is also referred to as a transimpedance amplifier.

Fig. 5: The operational floating conveyor constructed of two second generation current-conveyors.

Fig. 4: The operating principle of the current-feedback If a current-conveyor is a voltage-follower with operational amplifier. an additional output current-sensing circuit, the operational floating conveyor is a current-feedback op- The most commercial current-feedback opera- erational amplifier with a similar output current-sens- tional amplifier is AD844 [11], where the user has ing circuit. Alternatively this conveyor can be con- access to the high impedance node TZ. This amplifier structed of two cascaded current conveyors. With can also be utilised as a second generation current- this circuit, it is possible to realise all four types of conveyor and current to-voltage converter. The ap- amplifiers: voltage, current, transconductance, and plications and advantages in realizing active filter trans- transimpedance amplifiers, as presented in Figure 6. fer function using CFAs have received great attention The voltage amplifier in Figure 6 operates identically because the amplifier enjoys the feature of constant to the current-feedback operational amplifier realiza- feedback independent of closed loop gain and high tion of the noninverting voltage amplifier.The four slew rate besides having low output impedance. Thus amplifier types can also be realised with second gen- it is advantageous to use CFA as a basic building block eration current-conveyors as open loop amplifiers. in the accomplishment of various analog signal-pro- However, when operational floating conveyor cessing tasks. realisations are used, the amplifier gain is less sensi- IV. OPERATIONAL FLOATING tive to finite X-terminal impedance. Since the feed- CONVEYOR back reduces impedance levels at both X- and W- The operational floating conveyor (Figure 5) is a terminals, the band- widths of the amplifiers are less current-mode building block that combines the trans- sensitive to parasitic capacitances. Furthermore, the mission properties of a current-conveyor and a cur- feedback also reduces distortion at low frequencies rent-feedback operational amplifier, and has an ad- but still the current signal path from W- to Z-terminal ditional output current sensing capability [13]. The remain outside the feedback loop and thus the matrix representation of the operational floating con- nonlinearity remains unchanged in that part. veyor is A. Composite Conveyor The operational floating conveyor can be also con- figured to form a high performance second generation current-conveyor as presented in Figure 7a.

44 S-JPSET, Vol. 1, Issue 1 copyright samriddhi, 2010 Indu Prabha Singh, Kalayan Singh and S.N. Shukla

Fig. 7: Different composite conveyors. (a) A composite CCII+ with enhanced Zx resembling an operational floating conveyor. (b) A composite CCII- with a different technique to lower Zx. Fig. 6: Basic amplifier types realised with operational floating conveyor. (c) A composite CCII+ with enhanced Yx. (a) Voltage amplifier (b) Current amplifier (c) Transconductance (d) Transresistance B. Fully Differential Current Conveyor FDDCII This is a useful technique for designing CMOS cur- Recently, a new active element called the FDCCII rent-conveyors: with two poorly operating simple has been proposed [15] to improve the dynamic range CMOS positive second generation conveyors, one in mixed- mode applications where fully differential positive conveyor with enhanced X-terminal imped- signal processing is required. The matrix input-output ance Zx can be constructed. In the case of simple relationship of the eight-terminal FDCCII is: CMOS conveyors even the resistor RF can gener- ally be omitted as the X-terminal is high enough to prevent any stability and settling problems. There is an alternative way to construct a composite conveyor which lowers the X-terminal impedance. This composite CCII- is presented in Figure 7 b [14]. In this C. Operational Floating Current Conveyor composite conveyor, the lower conveyor CC2 works OFCC as a negative impedance conveyor and consequently The OFCC is a five-port network, comprised of the X-terminal impedance of the composite CCII- is; two inputs and three output ports, as shown in matrix representation 4. In this representation, the port labelled X repre- sents a low-impedance current input, port Y is a high- impedance input voltage, W is a low-impedance output voltage, and Z+, and Z- are the high-impedance current outputs with opposite polarities. The OFCC operates where the input current at port X is multi- plied by the open loop transimpedance gain to pro- duce an output voltage at port W. The input voltage at port Y appears at port X and, thus, a voltage tracking property exists at the input port. Output current 45 copyright samriddhi, 2010 S-JPSET, Vol. 1, Issue 1 Current Conveyor: Novel Universal Active Block flowing at port W is conveyed in phase to port Z+ and out of phase with that flowing into port Z-, so in this case, a current tracking action exists at the output port. Thus, the transmission properties of the ideal OFCC can be conveniently described as

where iy and vy are the inward current and volt- Fig. 8: Interreciprocal networks N and Na. age at the Y port, respectively, as shown in Fig. 4. ix and vx are the input current and voltage at the X port, respectively. iw and vw are the output current and The networks N and Na are thus said to be inter- voltage at W port, respectively. iZ and vZ and are the reciprocal to one another. When the output current and voltage at Z+ port, respectively. networks N and Na are identical, for example in Similarly, iZ- and vZ- and are the output current and the case of passive networks, the networks are said voltage at the Z- port, respectively. to be reciprocal. In order to maintain identical transfer functions for both the original network N and the V. CONVERSION OF VOLTAGE-MODE adjoint network Na the impedance levels in the cor- CIRCUIT TO CURRENT -MODE: responding nodes of both networks should be identi- ADJOINT PRINCIPLE cal. Therefore, the signal flow is reversed in the ad- As a wide range of voltage-mode analog circuits joint network and a voltage source is converted to a already exist, a straight forward method of convert- current sensing element as they both behave as short ing these voltage-mode circuits to current-mode cir- circuits. Similarly, a voltage sensing element is cuits would be very useful. In such a method a circuit converted to a current source. A list of circuit ele- using voltage ampli?ers and passive components is ments and their adjoint elements are presented in the converted into one that contains current ampli?ers and Table 1. passive components. An ideal voltage ampli?ers has In addition, controlled sources can be converted in?nite input impedance and zero output impedance, with the same principles: the signal flow is reversed while an ideal current ampli?er has zero input imped- and the impedance level is kept the same. In this way, ance and in?nite output impedance. Consequently, a voltage amplifier is converted to a current amplifier direct replacement of a voltage ampli?er with a cur- and a current amplifier is converted to a voltage am- rent ampli?er will lead to different circuit behaviour. plifier, respectively. However, since transresistance A voltage-mode circuit can be converted into a and transconductance amplifiers are inter-reciprocal, current-mode circuit by constructing an interreciprocal networks containing only transresistance or network by using the adjoint principle [1, 17]. transconductance amplifiers and passive elements dif- According to this principle, a network is replaced with fer only in signal direction and type. an adjoint network Na, the voltage excitation is inter- The adjoint principle can also be applied to tran- changed to a current response, and the voltage resistor level circuits. In this case, a bipolar transistor in sponse is interchanged to a current excitation, as dem- a common-emitter amplifier configuration is inter-re- onstrated in Figure 8.Thus, the resulting transfer func- ciprocal to itself and the common-collector amplifier tions of these two networks N and Na are identical: configuration has the common-base configuration as

46 S-JPSET, Vol. 1, Issue 1 copyright samriddhi, 2010 Indu Prabha Singh, Kalayan Singh and S.N. Shukla Table 1: Some circuit elements with their corresponding adjoint elements

Fig. 10: Sallen-Key active biquad Filter using Current conveyor II

Using the adjoint principle the low-pass Sallen- Key circuit can be replaced with a current conveyor based circuit. The transfer function is the same for both of the circuits

its adjoint. Converting a voltage-mode bipolar tran- (a) sistor circuit to a current-mode MOS-transistor circuit could be beneficial as it minimises the use of source-follower stages which have poor low-voltage performance due to the bulk effect. Bipolar transistor circuits are conventionally constructed of common- emitter and common-collector amplifier stages and the resulting MOS-transistor adjoint circuit is constructed of common-source and common-gate am- (b) plifier stages. Fig. 11: Instrumentation amplifiers (a) using Op-Amp (b) using CCII+

As shown in Figure11, Instrumentation amplifiers implemented with three op-amps. It requires several matched resistors to guarantee high CMRR because of the limited gain-bandwidth product of the high-gain amplifiers the bandwidth of the CMRR is limited. A differential amplifier with high CMRR can be also realised with two current conveyor and two resistors Fig. 9: Sallen- Key active biquad Filter using Op-amp without any matching components.

47 copyright samriddhi, 2010 S-JPSET, Vol. 1, Issue 1 Current Conveyor: Novel Universal Active Block VI. CONCLUSION [9] A. Fabre, "Third-generation current conveyor: a new helpful active element," Electronics Letters, vol. 31, From the above study it is observed that the band- pp. 338-339, March 1995. width of the current conveyor based amplifier is large [10] K. Manetakis, C. Toumazou, "A new high-frequency with high voltage gains as current conveyors operate very low output impedance CMOS buffer," Proc. IEEE in open-loop without the gain-bandwidth product limi- Int. Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS- tation. 96), Atlanta, 1996 pp. 485-488. [11] Soliman, A. M. (1998) A new filter configuration us- REFERENCES ing current feedback op-amp. Micoelectronics Jour- [1] K. Smith, A. Sedra, "The current-conveyor-a new cir- nal, 29, 409-419. cuit building block," IEEE Proc., vol. 56, pp. 1368-69, [12] R. Brennan, T. Viswanathan, J. Hanson, "The CMOS 1968. negative impedance con-verter, "IEEE J. Solid State [2] A. Sedra, K. Smith, "A second-generation current- Circuits, vol. 23, pp. 1272-1275, Oct. 1988. conveyor and its applications," IEEE Trans., vol. CT- [13] C. Toumazou, A. Payne, F. Lidgey, "Operational float- 17, pp. 132-134, 1970. ing conveyor," Electronic Letters, vol. 27, pp. 651- [3] D. Frey, "Log-domain filtering: an approach to cur- 652, April 1991. rent-mode filtering," IEE Pro-ceedings G, vol. 140, pp. [14] A. Fabre, H. Barthelemy, "Composite second-gen- 406-416, Dec. 1993. eration current conveyor with reduced parasitic re- [4] J. Hughes, N. Bird, I. Macbeth, "Switched currents - sistance," Electronic Letters, vol. 30, pp. 377-378, a new technique for analog sampled-data signal pro- March1994. cessing," in Proc. IEEE Int. Symposium on Circuits [15] 1 El-Adawy, A.A., Soli an, A.M., and Elwan, H.O.: 'A and Systems (ISCAS'89), Portland, USA, 1989, pp. novel fully differential current conveyor and applica- 1584-1587. tions for analog VLSI', IEEE Trans Circuits Syst. II, [5] C. Toumazou, F. J. Lidgey, D. G. Haigh (ed.), Ana- Analog Digit. Signal Process, 2000, 47,(4),pp. 306- logue IC design: the current-mode approach, Lon- [16] R. Zele, S. Lee, D. Allstot, "A high gain current-mode don, Peter Peregnirus Ltd, 1990, 646 p. operational amplifier," in Proc. IEEE Int. Symposium [6] Comlinear Corporation, A new approach to op-amp on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS'92), San Diego, USA, design, Application Note 300-1, March 1985. IEEE, pp. 2852-2855 [7] S. Daubert, D. Vallancourt, Y. Tsividis, "Current copier [17] G. Roberts, "All current-mode frequency selective cells," Electronics Let-ters, vol. 24, pp. 1560-1561, Dec. circuits," Electronics Letters, vol. 25, pp. 759-761, June 1988. 1989. [8] F. J. Lidgey, K. Hayatleh, "Current-feedback operational amplifiers and applica-tions,"Electronics & Communications Engineering Journal, vol. 9, pp. 176- 182, Aug. 1997.