Power-area-DR-frequency-selectivity tradeoffs in weakly nonlinear active filters

This paper discusses the fundamental tradeoffs that exist between the power dissipation, chip area, dynamic range, frequency of operation, and selectivity in continuous time active filters. These tradeoffs are demonstrated for the simple, but instructive, case of a Gm-C biquadratic filter. The analysis is based on the assumption that the distortion performance is dominated by weak third order nonlinearities. It is shown that this assumption yields tradeoffs that are very different from those described in the literature.