A LOW-VOLTAGE LOW-POWER FULLY-INTEGRATABLE AUTOMATIC GAIN-CONTROL FORHEARING INSTRUMENTS

A low-voltage low-power bipolar automatic gain control (AGC) for heari ng instruments that works in the current domain and operates on a sing le 1.3-V battery is presented. In this AGC a large time constant (50 m s) is realized on-chip. The AGC consists of a gain cell, a comparator and a voltage follower. The active circuitry of the AGC has been integ rated in the DIMES01 process and the total circuit demonstrates operat ion down to 1 V with only 4 muW power consumption. The compression ran ge amounts to 38 dB. The AGC has a dynamic range (DR) of 62 dB at the output over a bandwidth of 10 kHz.