A Background Timing Skew Calibration Technique in Time-Interleaved ADCs

With the development of broadband wireless communication and DSP-based wireline communication, there is a rising demand for medium-resolution (6~8bit) ADCs with multi-gigahertz sampling rates and low power consumption. Thus, the time-interleaved SAR ADC is a great choice with high energy efficiency and robust sub-channels. However, costly calibration engines are usually required to resolve channel mismatches, especially timing skew mismatch related to the input signal. Digital detection methods are often limited by the type of input signal, require a long time to converge, and consume area and power. A few analog techniques employ a timing reference signal to simplify the detection mechanisms [1], [2]. However, prior art [1] puts the timing reference signal in the same path as the input signal, which complicates its timing and increases subchannel conversion time. In [2] a modulated reference clock injection path on the CDAC is added and obtains the timing skew from the digitized injected voltage. Even though the extra conversion time is saved, digital circuits for demodulation are required, and the skew-related voltage on the CDAC is so small that digital units require 1M average cycles to improve accuracy. This work presents a background timing skew calibration that achieves input independence by common-mode voltage injection. Furthermore, a replica switch in the sampler is added to isolate the calibration circuit from the quantizer. This simplifies the detection circuit and makes it shared among the four channels to reduce errors. With a near 4GHz input, the presented technique suppresses the timing skew tones below -52dB in <12K samples.

A subranging analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with reference-embedded comparators (RECs) is proposed. By adjusting the bias current and/or body voltage of the REC's input differential pair, the REC offset can be adjusted to a specific voltage equal to a reference voltage referred to henceforth as the embedded reference. For the ADC's coarse stage, RECs with wide-range embedded references are implemented by adjusting the bias currents using current source arrays to cover the full-scale input. By contrast, for the ADC's fine stage, RECs with narrow-range embedded references are implemented by adjusting the body voltage. In addition, the centers of the embedded references in the different ADC subranges are created by current source arrays, which are digitally scaled according to the coarse ADC's output codes. As a result, the reference-voltage-switching network used in conventional subranging ADCs is not required, and hence the speed of the ADC is increased. Moreover, to eliminate the effects of process variation, the bias currents and body voltages in the RECs are calibrated with an auxiliary resistor ladder. After the calibration, the resistor ladder is removed. Consequently, no resistor ladder is used during normal operation, which greatly saves power. A 3 mW 6-bit 4 GS/s REC-based subranging ADC is implemented in 28-nm CMOS technology. With a near Nyquist frequency input, the ADC achieves SNDRs of 31.8 dB and 30.7 dB at 3.6 GS/s and 4 GS/s, respectively. Moreover, at 3.6 GS/s, the ADC has a Walden Figure-of-Merit (FoM <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">W</sub> ) of 22.7 fJ/conv-step, which is the best compared with prior state-of-the-art 6-bit high-speed ADCs.

A modified statistics-based background calibration algorithm is proposed, which estimates and compensates errors due to the timing skew of time-interleaved ADCs in a digital-mixing way. The mismatch-induced error signal is corrected by calculating the cross-correlation between each sub-ADC and an additional calibration ADC. The output of the supplementary channel is delayed during data processing, different from the conventional statistics-based method that is susceptible to quantization noise. Simulation results of an 8-bit 2-GS/s four-channel time-interleaved ADC behavioral model show that the proposed method is effective and efficient.

A software-defined radio (SDR) for ultrawideband (UWB) communication systems places several stringent requirements on the analog-to-digital converter (ADC). One alternative to using a single ADC is to sample the received signal with an array of lower speed ADCs that were driven by interleaved sampling clocks; however, mismatches among the ADCs will result in signal distortion. This paper makes three important contributions to overcoming this problem: 1) analytical quantification of the impact of ADC gain, offset, and timing mismatches on the performance of a time-interleaved sampling ADC array for UWB signals; 2) demonstration of the efficacy of using a pilot-based matched-filter architecture to mitigate the impact of timing mismatches in the presence of multipath; and 3) implementation of an 8-ADC time-interleaved UWB SDR testbed that operates at an effective sampling frequency of 6.4 GHz. In addition, our findings allow for the design specification of the number of pilots required to obtain a desired system performance. The simulation and measured performance results from this paper demonstrate that ADC mismatches can be controlled to within plusmn10%, yielding acceptable levels of distortion and bit-error-rate (BER) performance on the UWB SDR testbed. Both analytical and simulation results also demonstrate the efficacy of a pilot-based matched filter in mitigating the impact of timing mismatch errors, even in the presence of multipath.

We have designed single-bit comparators and multi-bit flash analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) using three flavors of periodic comparators; one flavor uses a differential “quasi-one-junction” SQUID (DQOS) comparator, the second use a differential SQUID wheel comparator (DSW) and the third uses a symmetric differential SQUID wheel comparator (SDSW) with time-interleaved clocks. We have also developed a new performance analysis scheme that enables full reconstruction of input signal using a single-bit comparator. The signal is reconstructed based on multiple beat frequency measurements that track the position of the comparator thresholds in response to a dc offset to the input signal. In addition, to eliminate the frequency dependent distortions resulting from impedance mismatches over wide bandwidths, the signal and clock distribution network have been optimized using EM simulations. For distributing the clock signal to the multi-bit comparators, a 50 Ω coplanar transmission line has been designed. Test results for a 1-bit DSW comparator demonstrates a performance of 4.5 bits of resolution in Gray code for a beat frequency test using a 20 GHz input signal and 5.3 bits for 10 GHz input. 4 and 8-bit versions of the flash ADC with a DQOS comparator and a 3-bit time-interleaved ADC using the SDSW comparator have also been designed. The DQOS ADC has been tested up to 25 GHz input signal frequency with performance of 4.3 bits of resolution in Gray code for 19.7 GHz input signal. The time-interleaved ADC performance is 4.3 bits for a 15 GHz beat frequency test with an effective sampling rate of 30 GHz.

Dynamic Architecture and Frequency Scaling (DAFS) is shown to realize superlinear power scaling in high-speed analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). To achieve both high-speed operation and low power consumption, the ADC architecture is reconfigured between binary search and flash every clock cycle, relying on the conversion delay. The proposed binary search/flash architecture reconfigurable ADC can be implemented with only a small modification to conventional binary search ADCs. By live configuring, the flash operation is adaptively performed when an excess delay is detected. DAFS not only significantly improves the power scaling but also compensates for transistor speed shifts due to process, voltage and temperature (PVT) variations. Therefore, DAFS can be used to improve the design margin of high-speed ADCs. A prototype subranging ADC fabricated in 65 nm CMOS technology operates up to 1220 MS/s and achieves an SNDR of 36.2 dB with a Nyquist input frequency. DAFS is active between 820-1220 MS/s and achieves peak power reduction of 30%, when compared with the power scaling when DAFS is disabled. A peak FoM of 85 fJ/conv. was obtained at 820 MS/s, which is nearly a twofold improvement over that of previously reported subranging ADCs.

This article presents a 12-GS/s 12-bit <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$4{\times }$ </tex-math></inline-formula> time-interleaved (TI) pipelined analog-to-digital converter (ADC), which utilizes a global dither injection (GDI) scheme to facilitate an input-independent background timing skew calibration. The GDI scheme adds dithers into the input signal of the push-pull source follower (PP-SF) in the input buffer (IBF), avoiding undetectable skews in conventional local dither injection (LDI) schemes. Meanwhile, the perturbations between the input signal and dither are mitigated by cross-coupled capacitive networks. This work also significantly improves the efficiency of the interleaver using the following techniques: first, the PP-SF-based IBF is linearized by a self-adaptive current compensation (SACC), achieving high linearity under 1.2-V low supply voltage headroom. Second, the speed of the 12-bit channel is lifted to 3 GS/s in 28-nm CMOS using a sturdy ring amplifier (SRingAmp) with feedforward (FF), which enables a nonhierarchical interleaver with a small interleaving factor of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$4{\times }$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. The time-interleaved ADC attains a 54.1-dB SNDR and a 66.0-dB SFDR under a near-Nyquist input with 179.8-mW power consumption, translating into a Walden figure of merit (FoM) of 36.2 fJ/conversion step and a Schreier FoM of 159.3 dB.

This brief proposes an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) based on Generalized Sampling Theorem and derives a closed form expression of its performance, viz., signal-to-quantization noise ratio (SQNR) and alias-suppression (AS). The ADCs in the 2-channels sample the signal and its filtered version, respectively, at half the Nyquist rate. The outputs of the two ADCs are upsampled by a factor of 2, passed through appropriate reconstruction filters, and then added to give an effective sample-rate which is double that of the sample-rate of each channel ADC. Performance of the proposed ADC has been summarized for simple filters like differentiator, integrator, passive RC low-pass filter, and passive CR high-pass filters. The proposed ADC could therefore be used as an alternative to other popular ADC structures like time-interleaved, frequency-interleaved, and filter-bank ADCs, to achieve high sample-rate with minimal analog circuit overhead.

This paper presents a digital background timing-skew calibration technique with high accuracy and bandwidth in time-interleaved (TI) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). Compared with other calibration works, it features three highlights. Firstly, the proposed DCSD-based step-by-step and grouping calibration scheme can effectively improve the correction accuracy by minimizing the root mean square (RMS) value of the detected timing skews. Secondly, the linear compensation for a 13-taps FIR filter and the decimation-calibration-interpolation working pattern are used to expand the calibration effective bandwidth to the whole first Nyquist zone from different perspectives. Thirdly, the binary search is employed, instead of LMS algorithm, in order to meet the compensation requirement for FIR filter and improve the convergence speed and accuracy significantly in timing-skew detection. As a result, the proposed technique achieves the widest calibration bandwidth and higher accuracy compared to other fully digital calibration techniques while having the great convergence speed. Simulation model in MATLAB and FPGA-based hardware verification are employed to demonstrate its significant improvement on the performance and hardware overhead of the TI-ADCs. Finally, the proposed technique is employed in a 10-bit 2.5 GS/s 4-way TI-SAR ADC fabricated by standard CMOS 28nm process. The measurement results show that with the proposed technique, the SFDR and SNDR are improved by 18.9 and 17.9 dB at Nyquist frequency, respectively.

This paper presents a high-speed and power-efficient successive-approximation-register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC). A dual-DAC architecture is proposed to enhance the conversion rate by decreasing the worst-case logic delay and thus the time needed for each conversion cycle. A 1-bit redundancy is introduced to absorb the decision errors caused by the mismatch between the two DACs and to relax the DAC settling requirement. In addition, an addition-only digital error correction technique is utilized to convert the non-binary codes into binary ones. A 10-bit SAR ADC is designed in a 28-nm FDSOI CMOS technology. The ADC achieves a signal-to-noise-plus-distortion ratio (SNDR) of 59.69 dB at the Nyquist input frequency, while consuming 1.53 mW from a 1.0 V power supply at 400 MS/s. The resulting figure-of-merit (FOM) is 4.86 fJ/conv.-step.

Sample-time error among the channels of a time-interleaved analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is the main reason for significant degradation of the effective resolution of the high-speed time-interleaved ADC. A calibration technique for sample-time mismatches has been proposed and implemented at a low level of complexity. The calibration method uses random data and is especially suitable for ADCs used in digital data communication systems. An 800-MS/s four-channel, time-interleaved ADC system has been implemented to evaluate the performance of the technique. The experimental results show that the spurious-free dynamic range of the ADC system is improved to 58.1 dB at 350 MHz. The ADC system achieves a signal-to-noise and distortion ratio of 59.6 dB at 5 MHz and 50.1 dB at 350 MHz after calibration.

High-speed track-and-hold amplifier (THA) circuits are critical for high-speed, high-resolution data converters, particularly in emerging 100Gb/s optical communication systems. High-speed CMOS analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) have been demonstrated to 56GS/s, but the linearity tends to rapidly degrade at high frequency. The use of a high-speed THA can broaden the frequency response, improve the distortion performance, and mitigate some of the timing requirements for high-speed time-interleaved ADCs. Recent THA work has leveraged high-fmax Indium Phosphide (InP) HBTs to implement 50GS/s track-and-hold amplifiers. Nonetheless, a two-chip solution consisting of an InP THA and time-interleaved CMOS ADCs is extremely difficult to package while retaining high-speed performance.

본 연구에서 매우 정밀한 샘플링을 필요로 하는 고해상도 비디오 응용면을 위하여 병렬 파이프라인 아날로그 디지털 변환기(ADC)를 설계하였다. 본 ADC의 구조는 4 채널의 10-비트 파이프라인 ADC를 병력 time-interleave로 구성한 구조로서 이 구조에서 채널 당 샘플링 속도의 4배인 200MS/s의 샘플링 속도를 얻을 수 있었다. 변환기에서 핵심이 되는 구성요소는 Sample and Hold 증폭기(SHA), 비교기와 연산증폭기이며 먼저 SHA를 전단에 설치하여 시스템 타이밍 요구를 완화시키고 고속변환과 고속 입력신호의 처리론 가능하게 하였다. ADC 내부 단들의 1-비트 DAC, 비교기 및 2-이득 증폭기는 한 개의 switched 캐패시터 회로로 통합하여 고속동작은 물론 저 전력소비가 가능한 특성을 갖도록 하였다. 본 연구의 연산증폭기는 2단 차동구조에 부저항소자를 사용하여 높은 DC 이득을 갖도록 보강하였다. 본 설계에서 각 단에 D-플립플롭(D-FF)을 사용한 지연회로를 구성하여 변환시 각 비트신호를 정렬시켜 타이밍 오차를 최소화하였다. 된 변환기는 3.3V 공급전압에서 280㎽의 전력소비를 갖고 DNL과 INL은 각각 +0.7/-0.6LSB, +0.9/-0.3LSB이다. This paper introduces the design or parallel Pipeline high-speed analog-to-digital converter(ADC) for the high-resolution video applications which require very precise sampling. The overall architecture of the ADC consists of 4-channel parallel time-interleaved 10-bit pipeline ADC structure a]lowing 200MSample/s sampling speed which corresponds to 4-times improvement in sampling speed per channel. Key building blocks are composed of the front-end sample-and-hold amplifier(SHA), the dynamic comparator and the 2-stage full differential operational amplifier. The 1-bit DAC, comparator and gain-2 amplifier are used internally in each stage and they were integrated into single switched capacitor architecture allowing high speed operation as well as low power consumption. In this work, the gain of operational amplifier was enhanced significantly using negative resistance element. In the ADC, a delay line Is designed for each stage using D-flip flops to align the bit signals and minimize the timing error in the conversion. The converter has the power dissipation of 280㎽ at 3.3V power supply. Measured performance includes DNL and INL of +0.7/-0.6LSB, +0.9/-0.3LSB.

In this paper a methodology to develop PSpice (SPICE) model for flash type analog to digital converters and its validation is presented. With the onset of the Internet of Things and ongoing digitization of electronic devices around us, almost every device needs an interface or controlling unit as a digital computing device. As more and more products perform calculations in the digital or discrete time domain, more sophisticated data converters must translate the digital data to and from our inherent analog world. This varied nature of interfaces necessitates simulation of ADC along with a functional simulation of the system to optimize the performance of design and improve reliability. The paper focuses on the development of a functional model for ADC which can expedite system development. The design philosophy was at the block level and the development was conducted for commercially available ADC, AD7828. The complete model has been simulated using PSpice and results were compared with laboratory test measurements using AD7828.

Problem statement: Pipelined architecture is considered to be the most suitable for high-speed and high-resolution applications among varies Nyquist Analogue to Digital Converters (ADCs) in nowadays digital signal processing domain. But the pipeline power consumption is growing with the technology scaling. For a pipeline ADC with high speed and high resolution, the fore-end track and hold amplifier and residual amplifier occupies the most power consumption of the whole system, so new and novel methods is needed to lower the amplifier power consumption. Approach: Different from the traditional use of close-loop amplifier, open-loop amplifier is used as the first-stage residual amplifier, which greatly decreases the system power consumption and design difficulty. To correct the nonlinear error introduced by the open-loop amplifier, backend digital correction is applied. To validate the rationality and correctness of the method and confirm the design parameters, Verilog-A is used to build a behavioural model, Cadence simulation tool Spectre is used to get the result. Results: From the simulation result of the behavioural model, we get the Differential Nonlinearity (DNL) of the digitally backend correction ADC is -0.25∼0.25, Integral Nonlinearity (INL) is -0.5∼0.25, Spurious Free Dynamic Range (SFDR) is 77.8dB. The Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) of the system after correction is calculated to be 73.66dB, so the Effective Number of Bits (ENOB) of the is 11.78 bits. Conclusion: Digitally assisted backend correction is a novel approach to lower the power consumption of pipeline ADCs, which makes great significance in mixed signal system design. The use of open-loop amplifier instead of traditional closed-loop amplifier can effectively decrease the design difficulty and design process than before. Only the first stage residual amplifier is changed to open-loop in this article and this substitution can also be replicated in the track and hold circuit and the succeeding stages.