A rapid prototyping environment for high-speed reconfigurable analog signal processing

This paper reports on a rapid-prototyping platform for high-frequency continuous-time analog filters to be used in communication front-ends. A field programmable analog array (FPAA) is presented, which implements a unique hexagonal topology of 55 tunable OTAs for reconfigurable instantiation of G_m-C filters in a 0.13 mum CMOS technology. It is the first analog array to achieve a bandwidth, which allows processing of intermediate frequencies used in communication systems. In addition to the intuitive manual mapping of analog filters to the chip structure, a genetic algorithm with hardware in the loop is used for automated synthesis of transfer functions.