Current Conveyor Macromodels for Wideband RF Circuit Design

M. Brinson (London Metropolitan Univ., UK), V. Kuznetsov (Bauman Moscow Techn. Univ., Russia)

A high percentage of analogue integrated circuit designs use voltage domain signal processing techniques. Given the fact that integrated circuit current conveyors are high bandwidth current processing devices, often with superior RF performance when compared to comparable voltage domain devices, it is surprising that the number of current mode integrated circuits available, as standard of-the-shelf industrial items, is so small. This paper introduces equation-defined device and Verilog-A synthesis approaches to the macromodelling of current conveyor integrated circuits. To illustrate the proposed modelling techniques the properties of a number of modular behavioural level current conveyor macromodel cells are described and their performance compared. The material presented is intended for analogue device modellers and circuit designers who wish to simulate current domain integrated circuit designs. It also demonstrates how synthesized Verilog-A functional blocks can be derived from equation-defined device and conventional component subcircuits to form functional, computationally efficient current conveyor macromodels.