In this paper, a new active element called voltage differencing inverting buffered amplifier (VDIBA) is presented. Using single VDIBA and a capacitor, a new resistorless voltage-mode (VM) first-order all-pass filter (APF) is proposed, which provides both inverting and non-inverting outputs at the same configuration simultaneously. The pole frequency of the filter can be electronically controlled by means of bias current of the internal transconductance. No component-matching conditions are required and it has low sensitivity. In addition, the parasitic and loading effects are also investigated. By connecting two newly introduced APFs in open loop a novel second-order APF is proposed. As another application, the proposed VM APF is connected in cascade to a lossy integrator in a closed loop to design a four-phase quadrature oscillator. The theoretical results are verified by SPICE simulations using TSMC 0.18 μm level-7 CMOS process parameters with ±0.9 V supply voltages. Moreover, the behavior of the proposed VM APF was also experimentally measured using commercially available integrated circuit OPA860 by Texas Instruments.

Due to the absence of commercially available fractional-order capacitors and inductors, their implementation can be performed using fractional-order differentiators and integrators, respectively, combined with a voltage-to-current conversion stage. The transfer function of fractional-order differentiators and integrators can be approximated through the utilization of appropriate integer-order transfer functions. In order to achieve that, the Continued Fraction Expansion as well as the Oustaloup’s approximations can be utilized. The accuracy, in terms of magnitude and phase response, of transfer functions of differentiators/integrators derived through the employment of the aforementioned approximations, is very important factor for achieving high performance approximation of the fractional-order elements. A comparative study of the accuracy offered by the Continued Fraction Expansion and the Oustaloup’s approximation is performed in this paper. As a next step, the corresponding implementations of the emulators of the fractional-order elements, derived using fundamental active cells such as operational amplifiers, operational transconductance amplifiers, current conveyors, and current feedback operational amplifiers realized in commercially available discrete-component IC form, are compared in terms of the most important performance characteristics. The most suitable of them are further compared using the OrCAD PSpice software.