A νMOS soft-maximum current mirror

In this paper, we describe a novel circuit consisting of N+1 MOS transistors and a single floating gate which computes a soft maximum of N current inputs and reflects the result in the output transistor. An intuitive description of the operation of the circuit is given. Data from a working two-input version of the circuit is presented and discussed. The circuit features a high output voltage swing and an interesting feedback mechanism which causes its output impedance to be comparable to that of a normal MOS transistor despite the fact that the output device is a floating-gate transistor.