Operational Current Amplifier-Based Quadrature Oscillators Family

This paper investigates the application of the operational current amplifier (OCA) in the design of quadrature sinusoidal oscillators. There are numerous quadrature sinusoidal oscillators based on the three fundamental amplifiers namely the operational amplifier (OpAmp), the operational transconductance amplifier (OTA), and the operational transresistance amplifier (OTRA); however, their counterparts based on the OCA have not been reported. In this paper, several possible quadrature oscillator structures based on the OCA are systematically developed from their voltage mode active-RC counterparts using adjoint network theorem. Consequently, it is shown that the resulted oscillators do not necessarily preserve the attractive features of the voltage mode quadrature oscillators; namely providing explicit quadrature current output signals with equal amplitudes. When attempting to retain these features, it is found that the minimum OCAs needed is three. Analyzing this issue has paved the way for developing a novel OCA based integrator that promotes the invention of a new quadrature oscillator using only two OCAs. Simulation results obtained from a standard 150 nm CMOS process are provided. It is demonstrated that the proposed oscillator consumes approximately 350μ W while working in the 3 MHz range. Measurement results obtained from a prototype implemented using CMOS OCA ICs also confirms the proposed theory.