Hardware Implementation of a Low Power Memristor-Based Voltage Controlled Oscillator

Abstract

Designing and implementation of a low frequency voltage controlled oscillator to achieve a wide tuning range with a practical small area and low power constraints is a challenge. In this paper, the challenge is overcome by replacing the large values of resistances that occupy large Silicon area in the conventional design by memristors and hence smaller values of capacitances are used. Therefore, this paper proposes and characterizes a hardware implementation of a memristors-based voltage controlled oscillator that used in Electrical Neural Stimulation. The basic proposed circuit generates low frequency signals that range from 1.2 KHz to 3.4 KHz with small area and low power consumption about 0.49 mW. In addition, four-stages D-flip-flops are used as a frequency divider circuit to reduce the frequency range from KHz range to Hz range which is very useful in biomedical and embedded systems applications.