Other Building Blocks Having MTC or CC at Front-end and Their Applications - Current Conveyors: Variants, Applications and Hardware Implementations - page 341

Chapter 11
Other Building Blocks Having MTC or CC
at Front-end and Their Applications

Abstract There have been a number of disclosures of new building blocks which
have either the mixed-translinear-cell (MTC) or the CC at the front-end and more
often than not have more than three terminals thereby providing additional flexi-
bility and versatility in devising various functional circuits. This chapter presents a
number of such building blocks. In each case, typical hardware implementation of
such building blocks, along with their most significant applications, have also been
highlighted.

11.1 Introduction

In this chapter, we discuss those additional building blocks 1 whose front-end
consists of one or more MTC-type structures or CCs, thereby providing additional
flexibility and versatility for analog circuit designs.
It may be recalled that, as explained Chap. 9 of this monograph, the electronic-
tunability of R x is manifested in a number of other analog building blocks of relatively
more recent origin such as current-controlled current feedback amplifiers (CC-CFA),
current-controlled current differencing buffered amplifiers (CC-CDBAs), current-
controlled current differencing transconductance amplifiers (CC-CDTA),
current-controlled current conveyors transconductance amplifiers (CCCCTA) and
CCCIIs with negative intrinsic resistance etc. which also employ the MTC as a
basic front-end unit in their internal circuit architecture.
All the considered building blocks are implementable in both bipolar and CMOS
IC technologies and hence, the circuits employing them are attractive from the point
of view of IC implementation.

1 An exhaustive review of various existing analog circuit building blocks as well as several new
possible building blocks was presented in: Biolek et al. [ 1 ].