A novel wide-band envelope detector

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel wide-band envelope detector comprising a fully-differential operational transconductance amplifier (OTA), a full-wave rectifier and a peak detector. To enhance the frequency performance of the envelop detector, we utilize a gyrator-C active inductor load in the OTA for wider bandwidth. Additionally, it is shown that the high-speed rectifier of the envelope detector requires high bias current instead of the sub-threshold bias condition. The experimental results show that the proposed envelope detector can work from 100-Hz to 1.6-GHz with an input dynamic range of 50-dB at 100-Hz and 40-dB at 1.6-GHz, respectively. The envelope detector was fabricated on the TSMC 0.18-um CMOS process with an active area of 0.652 mm2.