Design of Low Voltage Reconfigurable Fractional Order Networks

Abstract

Fractional Calculus has been around for a long time now. The mathematical basics of Fractional Calculus were laid over 300 years ago. Given the multi-disciplinary nature of the subject, fractional-order continuous-time systems has been labeled by the scientists as the 21st century systems . The application areas of fractional calculus include but not limited to biochemistry, medicine, biology, neural networks, finance etc. Indeed, this emerging research area is slowly gaining momentum among electrical engineers while its deeply rooted mathematical concepts also slowly migrate to various engineering disciplines. The fractional-order circuits and system design is definitely an emerging area of interdisciplinary research. The fractional-order circuit and system design is offering some wonderful features which were not present in their integer-order system counterparts. Fractional-order circuits are believed to revolutionize the way we educate future engineers. Especially, its applications in biomedicine, neural networks, and chaotic systems are of particular importance to the scientists these days. There is no reason why we should remain modeling and designing systems and circuits in the integer-order subspace. One other important aspect of the interdisciplinary nature of this topic is that it will pave the way for more environment friendly materials that can be used to implement electronic circuits as most of the naturally occurring materials are found to fractional models instead of integer models. To integrate the fractional-order systems in the contemporary VLSI technology, it is important to follow the constraints set on the voltage and power standards. Therefore, the work in this thesis is focused on the electronic realization/implementation of the fractional-order networks using contemporary VLSI technology. While achieving the electronic designs of fractional-order circuits and systems, the main focus is laid on implementing the low-voltage circuits. For this purpose, the low-voltage Operational...