Advances in low-voltage ultra-low-power analog circuit design

In this paper it is argued that there are good reasons to choose current as the information-carrying quantity in the case of low-voltage ultra-low-power design constraints. This paper focuses on the influence of transfer quality on that choice. To obtain power-efficient transfer quality, indirect feedback is shown to be a good alternative to traditional feedback techniques. Two recently developed analog circuit techniques that both operate in the current domain and employ indirect feedback are described, being the continuous-time dynamic-translinear technique and the discrete-time switched-MOSFET technique.