A Low-Power and High-Precision Programmable Analog Filter Bank

Analog filter banks befit remote audio- and vibration-sensing applications, which require frequency analysis to be performed with low-power consumption and with moderate-to-high precision. The precision of a filter bank depends on both the signal-path precision (i.e., dynamic range) and also the parameter precision (e.g., accuracy of the center frequencies). This brief presents a new bandpass filter for audio-frequency filter banks and provides a procedure for designing this filter. The filter is used in a 16-channel filter bank which has been fabricated in a 0.35- CMOS process. This filter bank has a dynamic range exceeding 62 dB and consumes only 63.6 when biased for speech frequencies. The filter bank's parameters are set via floating-gate current sources. This brief shows how to use these floating gates to obtain a versatile filter bank that can be precisely reprogrammed to arbitrary filter spacings and frequency weightings, with a parameter accuracy exceeding 99%.