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In this paper a novel transconductance Bi-CMOS stage is described. This stage makes combined use of a translinear current gain cell and a negative resistance cell, to generate a linear tuneable transconductor. The transconductance stage was designed specifically for an integrated Gm-C filter application, and is shown to perform well at high frequencies.

An efficient method to eliminate redundant frequencies present in one of the existing multi-frequency methods for analog fault diagnosis is proposed in this paper. First the two-dimensional fault dictionary is constructed where entries are gain signatures of all faults and frequencies. The faults belonging to the same quantization levels are numbered sequentially and a frequency that has an ambiguity set with the highest number faults is eliminated after verifying that there are no repetitions after the deletion of this frequency. In this manner, all frequencies are examined for deletion. Finally the test frequencies, which cannot be deleted, remain resulting in a minimal set of test frequencies of a network to isolate a given set of faults.

Another method proposes a technique, which generates more number of frequencies to isolate all the faults, if the test frequencies generated using the existing methods are not sufficient.

The design of circuits which are robust against variations in operating and process conditions is crucial in today's IC industry. In the analog design flow this problem can be tackled during the sizing of a new circuit. However, hardly any methods are available which support the designer to compute such a robust design if discrete parameters should be considered in this design step. Discrete parameters arise predominantly if a layout-friendly sizing should be computed in the sense that, e.g., a manufacturing grid for the transistor lengths and widths is considered or that transistor multipliers are used to allow the layout of a transistor as multifinger or common centroid structure without applying rounding operations to the carefully computed sizing. This paper presents a new Branch-and-Bound based approach which allows the automatic computation of a robust design using classical and realistic worst case analysis. The results of the sizing of three circuits show that the new approach is highly efficient. The robustness of the results computed by the new approach is validated by Monte Carlo analyses.

The analog fuzzy intelligent controllers for autonomous mobile robot to avoid static and dynamic obstacles in its local environment are presented. The controller designed for the robot is reconfigurable in nature in terms of number of rules in database i.e. flexibility for online rule change as per the frequency of obstacle in the local environment. The controller is proposed with adjustable membership function in terms of shape and degree of overlapping with dynamic rule base. New accurate MAX and MIN circuits are introduced. The controller is simulated using Tanner^® tool. The two-input single-output fuzzy controller with 25 rules is implemented in 0.25µm CMOS technology. The maximum delay was found to be 9.915ns for the processing of 25 rules and the value of FLIPS was found to be 100.85 MFLIPS.