A Radiation-Hard Dual Channel 4-bit Pipeline for a 12-bit 40 MS/s ADC Prototype with extended Dynamic Range for the ATLAS Liquid Argon Calorimeter Readout Electronics Upgrade at the CERN LHC

The design of a radiation-hard dual channel 12-bit 40 MS/s pipeline ADC with extended dynamic range is presented, for use in the readout electronics upgrade for the ATLAS Liquid Argon Calorimeters at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The design consists of two pipeline A/D channels with four Multiplying Digital-to-Analog Converters with nominal 12-bit resolution each. The design, fabricated in the IBM 130 nm CMOS process, shows a performance of 68 dB SNDR at 18 MHz for a single channel at 40 MS/s while consuming 55 mW/channel from a 2.5 V supply, and exhibits no performance degradation after irradiation. Various gain selection algorithms to achieve the extended dynamic range are implemented and tested.Comment: 22 pages, 22 figures, accepted by JINS

Joint implementation of the sharing OTA and bias current regulation techniques in a 11-bit 10 MS/s pipelined ADC

The power dissipation of a pipeline analog to digital converter (ADC) depends on different design strategies. In this brief communication, an 11-bit pipeline ADC consisting of five stages with 2.5 effective bit resolution is described. The circuit combines two main techniques to improve power dissipation, such as sharing OTAs between adjacent ADC stages and dynamic regulation of the OTA biasing according to the stage and subcycle of operation. To reduce the charge injection effect caused by the OTA sharing added circuitry, the ADC uses a topology based on four-input OTAs to reduce the number of transmission gates. The ADC has been fabricated using a standard 0.35 µm CMOS process. It consumes 17.85 mW at 10 MSample/s sampling rate. With this resolution and sampling rate, the measurement results show that it achieves 58.20 dB SNDR and 9.38 bit ENOB at 1 MHz input frequency.This work has been partially funded by Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovaci´on (MCI), Agencia Estatal de Investigaci´on (AEI) and European Region Development Fund (ERDF/FEDER) under grant RTI2018-097088-BC3

Power reduction of a 12-bit 40-MS/s pipeline ADC exploiting partial amplifier sharing

High performance analog-to-digital converters (ADC) are essential elements for the development of high performance image sensors. These circuits need a big number of ADCs to reach the required resolution at a specified speed. Moreover, nowadays power dissipation has become a key performance to be considered in analog designs, specially in those developed for portable devices. Design of such circuits is a challenging task which requires a combination of the most advanced digital circuit, the analog expertise knowledge and an iterative design. Amplifier sharing has been a commonly used technique to reduce power dissipation in pipelined ADCs. In this paper we present a partial amplifier sharing topology of a 12 bit pipeline ADC, developed in 0.35 mum CMOS process. Its performance is compared with a conventional amplifier scaling topology and with a fully amplifier sharing one.This work has been supported by Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia of Spain and the European Regional Development Fund of the European Commission (FEDER) under grant TIN2006-15460-C04-04

Influence of the amplifier sharing tecnique in pipeline analog-to digital converters (ADCs)

Three 12 bit, 40 MS/s pipelined analog-to-digital-converters (ADCs) are developed in 0.35μm CMOS process with 3.3V single power supply. The proposed ADCs architectures study the influence of the amplifier sharing technique in the power consumption and the main performances in the pipeline ADCs. Simulations results with extracted netlists are provided and show that the amplifier sharing technique has potential to be used in the reduction of the power consumption.This work has been partially supported by Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia of Spain (TIN2006-15460-C04-04)

Low power VCO-based analog-to-digital conversion

textThis dissertation presents novel two stage ADC architecture with a VCO based second stage. With the scaling of the supply voltages in modern CMOS process it is difficult to design high gain operational amplifiers needed for traditional voltage domain two-stage analog to digital converters. However time resolution continues to improve with the advancement in CMOS technology making VCO-based ADC more attractive. The nonlinearity in voltage-to-frequency transfer function is the biggest challenge in design of VCO based ADC. The hybrid approach used in this work uses a voltage domain first stage to determine the most significant bits and uses a VCO based second stage to quantize the small residue obtained from first stage. The architecture relaxes the gain requirement on the the first stage opamp and also relaxes the linearity requirements on the second stage VCO. The prototype ADC built in 65nm CMOS process achieves 63.7dB SNDR in 10MHz bandwidth while only consuming 1.1mW of power. The performance of the prototype chip is comparable to the state-of-art in terms of figure-of-merit but this new architecture uses significantly less circuit area.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

A Low-Power, Reconfigurable, Pipelined ADC with Automatic Adaptation for Implantable Bioimpedance Applications

Biomedical monitoring systems that observe various physiological parameters or electrochemical reactions typically cannot expect signals with fixed amplitude or frequency as signal properties can vary greatly even among similar biosignals. Furthermore, advancements in biomedical research have resulted in more elaborate biosignal monitoring schemes which allow the continuous acquisition of important patient information. Conventional ADCs with a fixed resolution and sampling rate are not able to adapt to signals with a wide range of variation. As a result, reconfigurable analog-to-digital converters (ADC) have become increasingly more attractive for implantable biosensor systems. These converters are able to change their operable resolution, sampling rate, or both in order convert changing signals with increased power efficiency. Traditionally, biomedical sensing applications were limited to low frequencies. Therefore, much of the research on ADCs for biomedical applications focused on minimizing power consumption with smaller bias currents resulting in low sampling rates. However, recently bioimpedance monitoring has become more popular because of its healthcare possibilities. Bioimpedance monitoring involves injecting an AC current into a biosample and measuring the corresponding voltage drop. The frequency of the injected current greatly affects the amplitude and phase of the voltage drop as biological tissue is comprised of resistive and capacitive elements. For this reason, a full spectrum of measurements from 100 Hz to 10-100 MHz is required to gain a full understanding of the impedance. For this type of implantable biomedical application, the typical low power, low sampling rate analog-to-digital converter is insufficient. A different optimization of power and performance must be achieved. Since SAR ADC power consumption scales heavily with sampling rate, the converters that sample fast enough to be attractive for bioimpedance monitoring do not have a figure-of-merit that is comparable to the slower converters. Therefore, an auto-adapting, reconfigurable pipelined analog-to-digital converter is proposed. The converter can operate with either 8 or 10 bits of resolution and with a sampling rate of 0.1 or 20 MS/s. Additionally, the resolution and sampling rate are automatically determined by the converter itself based on the input signal. This way, power efficiency is increased for input signals of varying frequency and amplitude

Equalization-Based Digital Background Calibration Technique for Pipelined ADCs

In this paper, we present a digital background calibration technique for pipelined analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). In this scheme, the capacitor mismatch, residue gain error, and amplifier nonlinearity are measured and then corrected in digital domain. It is based on the error estimation with nonprecision calibration signals in foreground mode, and an adaptive linear prediction structure is used to convert the foreground scheme to the background one. The proposed foreground technique utilizes the LMS algorithm to estimate the error coefficients without needing high-accuracy calibration signals. Several simulation results in the context of a 12-b 100-MS/s pipelined ADC are provided to verify the usefulness of the proposed calibration technique. Circuit-level simulation results show that the ADC achieves 28-dB signal-to-noise and distortion ratio and 41-dB spurious-free dynamic range improvement, respectively, compared with the noncalibrated ADC

A 14-bit 250 MS/s IF Sampling Pipelined ADC in 180 nm CMOS Process

This paper presents a 14-bit 250 MS/s ADC fabricated in a 180 nm CMOS process, which aims at optimizing its linearity, operating speed, and power efficiency. The implemented ADC employs an improved SHA with parasitic optimized bootstrapped switches to achieve high sampling linearity over a wide input frequency range. It also explores a dedicated foreground calibration to correct the capacitor mismatches and the gain error of residue amplifier, where a novel configuration scheme with little cost for analog front-end is developed. Moreover, a partial non-overlapping clock scheme associated with a high-speed reference buffer and fast comparators is proposed to maximize the residue settling time. The implemented ADC is measured under different input frequencies with a sampling rate of 250 MS/s and it consumes 300 mW from a 1.8 V supply. For 30 MHz input, the measured SFDR and SNDR of the ADC is 94.7 dB and 68.5 dB, which can remain over 84.3 dB and 65.4 dB for up to 400 MHz. The measured DNL and INL after calibration are optimized to 0.15 LSB and 1.00 LSB, respectively, while the Walden FOM at Nyquist frequency is 0.57 pJ/step