A Compact and Ultra-Low-Power Low-Pass Filter Based on Band-to-Band Tunneling Effect

Continuous-time filters with low-frequency cutoff are crucial building blocks in analog signal processing circuits for speech processing and biomedical applications. The design of an integrated continuous-time filter with a cutoff frequency spanning from sub-Hz to a few kHz is constrained by the ultra-low power and area minimization requirement. In this brief, we have experimentally demonstrated a low pass filter response using only a single partially depleted (PD) silicon on insulator (SOI) transistor. The proposed novel filter is based on band to band tunnelling (BTBT). This low pass filter is on-chip tunable to provide a wide cutoff frequency ranging from 2 Hz to 20 kHz, with a silicon footprint of $9 \mathbf {\mu m^{2}}$ and the maximum power consumption of 0.6 nW in Global Foundries’ (GF) 45 nm RFSOI technology. The proposed tunneling-based filter is less prone to process variations and mismatches as compared to traditional integrated analog filters. The proposed BTBT-based passive RC filter with spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) of 29 dbc, outperforms previously reported filters in the literature in terms of power consumption and area. The ultra-low power consumption and area efficiency make this proposed low pass filter suitable for the multichannel analog front-end low-frequency filters for noise-tolerant neural network-based applications such as speech recognition and electrophysiological signal recognition.