Abstract: This paper presents a 4th-order reconfigurable analog baseband filter for software-defined radios. The design exploits an active-RC low pass filter (LPF) structure with digital assistant, which is flexible for tunability of filter characteristics, such as cut-off frequency, selectivity, type, noise, gain and power. A novel reconfigurable operational amplifier is proposed to realize the optimization of noise and scalability of power dissipation. The chip was fabricated in an SMIC 0.13 μm CMOS process. The main filter and frequency calibration circuit occupy 1.8 × 0.8 mm² and 0.48 × 0.25 mm² areas, respectively. The measurement results indicate that the filter provides Butterworth and Chebyshev responses with a wide frequency tuning range from 280 kHz to 15 MHz and a gain range from 0 to 18 dB. An IIP3 of 29 dBm is achieved under a 1.2 V power supply. The input inferred noise density varies from 41 to 133 nV/√Hz according to a given standard, and the power consumptions are 5.46 mW for low band (from 280 kHz to 3 MHz) and 8.74 mW for high band (from 3 to 15 MHz) mode.

Key words: reconfigurable, software-defined radio, baseband filter, digital assistant, high linearity