A 10-bit 10MS/s differential straightforward SAR ADC

A successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) design in 0.18-um CMOS process is presented for wireless power transfer applications. By applying body effect reduction T/H circuit that improved ENOB of the ADC. This proposed ADC uses asynchronous control logic without off-chip frequency clock. The measured consumption of 1.53 mW at input voltage of 1.8 V, sampling rate of 40 MS/s, the proposed design realizes a spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) of 62.16 dB, an effective number of bits (ENOB) of 8.93 bits, a signal-to-noise and distortion ratio (SNDR) of 55.52 dB, integral nonlinearity (INL) of 1.12 LSB and differential nonlinearity (DNL) of 0.63 LSB. The proposed SAR ADC is build-in internet of thing (IoT) system to meet low power requirement for wireless power receiver applications.

A new fully passive noise-shaping architecture for successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) was proposed. A first-order noise transfer function (NTF) with zero located nearly at one can be achieved. The additional pole increases the efficiency of noise shaping to further 3 dB. So, the use of higher over sampling ratios (OSR) and increased effective number of bits (ENOB) is possible. The architecture was applied to the design of a 9.8-bit ENOB SAR ADC in a 65 nm complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) of United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) with OSR equal to 10. A 6-bit capacitive DAC was used. The proposed architecture provides 3.8 additional bits in ENOB. The equalent input bandwitdth is equal to 200 kHz with the sampling rate equal to 4 MS/s.

This paper presents a 12-bit successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) that uses a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) configurable window switching technique. By reusing the capacitors in the DAC, the proposed window switching scheme yields window boundaries to determine whether the input is located within the window, and thus avoid unnecessary capacitor switching. The proposed window SAR ADC improves the conversion efficiency and ADC linearity. A qualitative analysis of prior window switching schemes is presented to elaborate for various applications. A low-input capacitance of 1 pF was adopted to relax the input and reference buffers. A prototype ADC was implemented in 180-nm CMOS occupying an active area of 0.1 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> . At 20 MS/s, it consumes a total power of 1.22 mW from a 1.5-V supply. The measured peak signal-to-noise and distortion ratio and spurious-free dynamic range were 61.7 and 79 dB, respectively. At the Nyquist rate, the measured effective number of bits (ENOB) was 9.53, equivalent to a figure-of-merit (FOM) of 83 fJ/conversion-step. In low-power mode (100 kS/s), it consumed a total power of 1.5μW from a 0.7-V supply. At the Nyquist rate, the measured ENOB was 9.82, equivalent to a FOM of 16.6 fJ/conversion step.

A novel area-efficient switching scheme is proposed for the successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). The capacitor-splitting structure, charge-average switching technique, and [Formula: see text] (equal to [Formula: see text]/4) are combined together and optimized to realize the proposed switching scheme. [Formula: see text] is only used in the last two bit cycles, which affects the ADC accuracy little and reduces capacitor area by half. It achieves a 98% less switching energy and an 87.5% less capacitor area compared with the conventional switching method. In addition, the DAC output common-mode voltage is approximately constant. Thus, the proposed switching method is a good tradeoff among power consumption, capacitor area, DAC output common-mode voltage, and ADC accuracy. The proposed SAR ADC is simulated in 0.18[Formula: see text][Formula: see text]m CMOS technology with a supply voltage of 0.6[Formula: see text]V and at a sampling rate of 20[Formula: see text]kS/s. The signal-to-noise-distortion ratio (SNDR) and spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) are 58.2 and 73.7[Formula: see text]dB, respectively. The effective number of bits (ENOB) is 9.4. It consumes 42[Formula: see text]nW, resulting in a figure-of-merit (FoM) of 3.11 fJ/conversion-step.

In this work, a switched capacitor-based successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) using a passive reference charge sharing and charge accumulation is proposed. For N-bit resolution, the fully differential version of this architecture needs only 6 capacitors, which is a significant improvement over conventional binary-weighted SAR ADC. The proposed SAR ADC is first modeled in MATLAB, and the effect of practical operational transconductance amplifier limitations such as finite values of gain, unity-gain bandwidth and slew rate on ADC characteristics is verified through behavioral simulations. To validate the proposed ADC performance, an 11-bit 2 kS/s SAR ADC is designed and laid out in UMC 180 nm 1P6M CMOS technology with a supply voltage of 1.8 V. The total design occupies an area of $$568\,\upmu \hbox {m} \times 298\,\upmu \hbox {m}$$ and consumes a power as less as $$0.28\,\upmu \hbox {W}$$ . It is found that the integral nonlinearity and differential nonlinearity of this ADC are in the range + 0.35/− 0.84 least significant bit (LSB) and + 0.1/− 0.6 LSB, respectively. In addition, dynamic performance test shows that the proposed SAR ADC offers an effective number of bits of 10.14 and a Walden figure of merit (FoMW) of 0.12 pJ/conv-step.

This paper presents an 8-bit 100KS/s successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital convertor (ADC) in SMIC 0.13 µm 1P8M process for biomedical applications. This ADC is implemented with sub-circuits consuming no static power, thereby preserving the desired low power characteristic. According to the measured results, the SAR ADC has a signal-to-noise distortion ratio (SNDR) of 49.2 dB, and the spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) of 63 dB for a 9.37 kHz full-scale input sinusoidal wave at a 100 kHz sampling rate. The effective number of bit (ENOB) is 7.8 bits. The differential nonlinearity (DNL) is in the range of −0.15/+0.15 LSB whereas the integral nonlinearity (INL) is within −0.35/+0.23 LSB. The total power is 3.2uW and the figure of merit (FOM) is 143 fJ/conversion-step.

This paper presents a 9-bit subrange analog-to-digital converter (ADC) consisting of a 3.5-bit flash coarse ADC, a 6-bit successive-approximation-register (SAR) fine ADC, and a differential segmented capacitive digital-to-analog converter (DAC). The flash ADC controls the thermometer coarse capacitors of the DAC and the SAR ADC controls the binary fine ones. Both theoretical analysis and behavioral simulations show that the differential non-linearity (DNL) of a SAR ADC with a segmented DAC is better than that of a binary ADC. The merged switching of the coarse capacitors significantly enhances overall operation speed. At 150 MS/s, the ADC consumes 1.53 mW from a 1.2-V supply. The effective number of bits (ENOB) is 8.69 bits and the effective resolution bandwidth (ERBW) is 100 MHz. With a 1.3-V supply voltage, the sampling rate is 200 MS/s with 2.2-mW power consumption. The ENOB is 8.66 bits and the ERBW is 100 MHz. The FOMs at 1.3 V and 200 MS/s, 1.2 V and 150 MS/s and 1 V and 100 MS/s are 27.2, 24.7, and 17.7 fJ/conversion-step, respectively.

The readout of silicon strip sensors in the upgraded Tracker System of Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment will require a novel complex Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). The ASIC will extract and digitise analogue signal from the sensor and subsequently will perform digital processing and serial data transmission.One of the key processing blocks, placed in each channel, will be an Analogue to Digital Converter (ADC). A prototype of fast, low-power 6-bit Successive Approximation Register (SAR) ADC was designed, fabricated and tested. The measurements of ADC prototypes confirmed simulation results showing excellent overall performance. In particular, very good resolution with Effective Number Of Bits (ENOB) 5.85 was obtained together with very low power consumption of 0.35 mW at 40 MS/s sampling rate. The results of the performed static and dynamic measurements confirm excellent ADC operation for higher sampling rates up to 80 MS/s.

A resolution-independent successive approximation register (SAR) analog to digital converter (ADC) architecture based on a switched capacitor integrator is presented. Digital to analog converter (DAC) architecture uses charge sharing and integration principle for reference generation, using only six unit capacitors for a fully differential version. A 10-bit, 1.8-V and 0.9-MS/s SAR ADC is designed in 180-nm CMOS process. ADC architecture is area efficient when compared with SAR ADC with a binary weighted capacitor array DAC. The architecture is largely parasitic insensitive, also programmable resolution is possible with no hardware overhead.

This paper presents a new single channel 6-bit 900MS/s asynchronous binary search analog to digital converter (ADC). The proposed ADC works based on binary search principle like the Successive Approximation Register (SAR) ADC. Compared to SAR ADC the speed is improved significantly adopting two design techniques. By implementing the binary search in an open loop configuration using asynchronous clock generation the delay in the feedback path of the SAR ADC is relaxed significantly. Moreover in the proposed asynchronous binary search ADC two bits are resolved in each stage of the ADC. By resolving two bits in each stage the proposed ADC can operate twice as fast as conventional asynchronous binary search ADCs. The proposed single channel 6-bit 900MS/s ADC was designed in 90nm CMOS process. Simulation results show that the proposed ADC reaches a peak SNDR of 35.82dB consuming 4.33mW from a single 1.2V power supply. It achieves of 95.3fJ/conv.code FoM.

Energy consumption is very critical for environmental monitoring using wireless sensor networks, thus, every block must be designed to consume low energy to be within the limited energy budget of a sensor node. In the context of improving the power efficiency of the analog-to-digital converter (ADC), for this specific application, successive approximation register (SAR) ADC is the best architecture to use. In addition, coarse-fine technique has been proven to reduce power consumption in SAR ADCs. However, design considerations involving the coarse ADC bit allocation are important but not discussed in literature. These includes the following: trade off between resolution of the coarse stage and the accuracy of the ADC; trade off between the energy consumption, accuracy and speed of the comparator block; and trade off between energy consumption and accuracy of different switching schemes for the digital-to-analog (DAC) block. This project produced models of these trade-offs, provided a methodology in designing coarse-fine SAR ADCs, implemented two ADCs in the schematic level: the one with the lowest energy consumption; and the one with the highest Schreier figure of merit (FoMs), and implemented the ADC with the lowest energy consumption in the layout level. Optimization using the MATLAB model in the DAC lead to k = 4 which gives the lowest power and k = 3 which gives the highest Schreier FoM. Schematic implementation at 50kSps of k = 4 and k = 3 gave: 2.201pJ and 2.3617pJ switching energy; 9.2 and 9.3 ENOB; and 170.96 dB and 170.72 dB Schreier FoM, respectively. This project was also able to match the trends of the models to the simulations although there are deviations of values. However, ENOBs fall within the target range of ENOBs.

This article presents a 9-bit 500-MS/s 2-bit/cycle successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with an error-tolerant interpolation technique. The proposed interpolation technique uses flip-flops to implement a 2-bit/cycle operation in the SAR ADC. By taking advantage of the metastable region of the flip-flop, the proposed interpolator can defer the bit decision when a decision error occurs with a high probability. Because the SAR ADC approximates the signal range step by step, the deferred decisions proceed to the next conversion cycles without any increase in quantization noise. The deferring-decision characteristic increases the error tolerance in the presence of comparator mismatches and increases the inherent linearity of the interpolation technique compared to conventional latch interpolation. A prototype ADC was designed using the 28-nm CMOS technology to verify the effectiveness of the proposed interpolation technique. The measured signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio (SNDR) and spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) at the Nyquist rate are 50.6 and 61.4 dB, respectively. The power consumption is 1.87 mW at a sampling frequency of 500 MS/s. The proposed ADC achieves a Walden figure of merit (FoM) of 13.5 fJ/conversion-step.

We propose a new approach in reducing the power consumption of the Successive approximation register Analog to Digital Converter (SAR-ADC) by changing the convergence algorithm of the Digital to Analog converter (DAC) input of the SAR-ADC. Different search algorithms such as binary search tree, moving binary search tree (BST), least significant bit shifter (LSB), adaptive algorithm and split-register moving BST algorithm are designed and analyzed for faster convergence of the DAC input. In this paper, we design a 0.8 GS/s, 8 bit (Effective number of bits (ENOB) − 7.42), 8.352 mW SAR ADC with a proposed moving BST algorithm in 65nm CMOS which ranks amongst the current state of the art ADCs with a FOM 65.25fJ/step.

This paper presents a low-voltage and power-efficient 10 bit successive-approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC). The input-range-adaptive (IRA) switching method is proposed to reduce the average switching power of capacitive digital-to-analog convertor (DAC) by 91% compared with the conventional approach. By utilizing the comparator as a voltage-to-time converter (VTC) with a time-domain quantizer, the implemented early-late (E/L) detection circuit, the input range is detected to eliminate the unnecessary DAC switching power efficiently. A prototype ADC chip is fabricated in 90 nm CMOS technology with an active area of 0.038 mm2. At 0.35-to-0.5 V supply voltage and 0.3-to-2 MS/s sampling rate with a Nyquist input, the ADC achieves a signal-to-noise-plus-distortion ratio (SNDR) of 55.5 dB to 56.3 dB and a corresponding effective number of bits (ENOB) of 8.92 bit to 9.06 bit respectively with a power consumption of $0.3~\mu \text {W}$ to $2.5~\mu \text {W}$ and a resulting figure of merit (FoM) from 1.94 fJ/conversion-step to 2.32 fJ/conversion-step.

High precision and large dynamic range measurement are required in the readout systems for the Water Cherenkov Detector Array (WCDA) in the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO). This paper presents a prototype of a 12-bit 40 MSPS Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) designed for the readout of the LHAASO WCDA. Combining this ADC and the front-end ASIC finished in our previous work, high precision charge measurement can be achieved based on the digital peak detection method. This ADC is implemented based on a power-efficient Successive Approximation Register (SAR) architecture, which incorporates key parts such as a Capacitive Digital-to-Analog Converter (CDAC), dynamic comparator and asynchronous SAR control logic. The simulation results indicate that the Effective Number Of Bits (ENOB) with a sampling rate of 40 MSPS is better than 10 bits in an input frequency range below 20 MHz, while its core power consumption is 6.6 mW per channel. The above results are good enough for the readout requirements of the WCDA.