Floating-gate and quasi-floating gate MOS transistors can be efficiently employed to design CMOS transconductors. These transistors allow achievement of relevant features in a compact and simple way, such as rail-to-rail input range, continuous transconductance tuning, and class AB operation. This paper illustrates how these techniques can be applied by employing them in the design of two transconductors, which have been fabricated in a 0.5 μm CMOS process. Measurement results confirm the advantages of the proposed approach.

An enhanced single-stage folded cascode operational transconductance amplifier able to drive large capacitive loads is presented. Circuits that adaptively bias the input differential pair and the current folding stage are employed, which provide class AB operation with dynamic current boosting and increased gain-bandwidth (GBW) product. Measurement results of a test chip prototype fabricated in a 0.5-μm CMOS process show an increase in slew rate and GBW by a factor of 30 and 15, respectively, versus the class A version using the same supply voltage and bias currents. Overhead in other performance metrics is small.

A novel class AB current mirror is presented. The circuit combines high current-handling capability with high accuracy, very low input resistance, low supply voltage requirements, and low standby power consumption. Measurement results of the circuit, fabricated in a 0.5 µm CMOS technology, show a THD of −60 dB for input current amplitudes 20 times larger than the bias current and a quiescent power consumption of 165 µW.

An enhanced super class AB recycling folded cascode operational transconductance amplifier is presented. It combines various adaptive biasing and transconductance enhancement techniques. Measurement results of a CMOS 130 nm test chip prototype show an improvement in slew rate and gain-bandwidth product by factors 100 and 27, respectively, compared to the conventional recycling folded cascode topology for the same supply voltage and bias currents.

An energy harvesting device combined with a giant magnetoimpedance (GMI) sensor is presented to analyze low frequency vibrating systems. An electromagnetic harvester based on magnetic levitation is proposed for the electric power generation. The device is composed of two fixed permanent magnets at both ends of a cylindrical frame, a levitating magnet acting as inertial mass and a pick-up coil to collect the induced electromotive force. At the resonance frequency (10 Hz) a maximum electrical power of 1.4 mW at 0.5 g is generated. Moreover, an amorphous wire was employed as sensor nucleus for the design of a linear accelerometer prototype. The sensor is based on the GMI effect where the impedance changes occur as a consequence of the variations of the effective magnetic field due to an oscillating magnetic element. As a result of the magnet’s periodic motion, an amplitude modulated signal (AM) was obtained, its amplitude being proportional to mechanical vibration amplitude (or acceleration). The sensor’s response was examined for a simple ferrite magnet under vibration and compared with that obtained for the vibrational energy harvester. As a result of the small amplitudes of vibration, a linear sensor response was obtained that could be employed in the design of low cost and simple accelerometers.