Translinear transconductor design for cochlear filter banks

The five major requirements of a transconductance-C integrator for use in cochlear filter banks are: low voltage, low power, small area, wide tuning range, and high dynamic range. The BiCMOS transconductor of Andreou and Liu (1993), which incorporates MOSTs operating in strong and weak inversion and a bipolar current multiplier, simultaneously satisfies all of these design criteria. Moreover, each stage of the transconductor can be optimized in order to achieve the best overall performance. A similar design strategy can be applied to MOSFET-C implementations.