Transistor-Level Synthesis of Pipeline Analog-to-Digital Converters Using a Design-Space Reduction Algorithm

A novel transistor-level synthesis procedure for pipeline ADCs is presented. This procedure is able to directly map high-level converter specifications onto transistor sizes and biasing conditions. It is based on the combination of behavioral models for performance evaluation, optimization routines to minimize the power and area consumption of the circuit solution, and an algorithm to efficiently constraint the converter design space. This algorithm precludes the cost of lengthy bottom-up verifications and speeds up the synthesis task. The approach is herein demonstrated via the design of a 0.13 μm CMOS 10 bits@60 MS/s pipeline ADC with energy consumption per conversion of only 0.54 pJ@1 MHz, making it one of the most energy-efficient 10-bit video-rate pipeline ADCs reported to date. The computational cost of this design is of only 25 min of CPU time, and includes the evaluation of 13 different pipeline architectures potentially feasible for the targeted specifications. The optimum design derived from the synthesis procedure has been fine tuned to support PVT variations, laid out together with other auxiliary blocks, and fabricated. The experimental results show a power consumption of 23 [email protected] V and an effective resolution of 9.47-bit@1 MHz. Bearing in mind that no specific power reduction strategy has been applied; the mentioned results confirm the reliability of the proposed approach.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TEC2009-08447Junta de Andalucía TIC-0281

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

A novel digital background calibration technique for 16 bit SHA-less multibit pipelined ADC

In this paper, a high resolution of 16 bit and high speed of 125MS/s, multibit Pipelined ADC with digital background calibration is presented. In order to achieve low power, SHA-less front end is used with multibit stages. The first and second stages are used here as a 3.5 bit and the stages from third to seventh are of 2.5 bit and last stage is of 3-bit flash ADC. After bit alignment and truncation of total 19 bits, 16 bits are used as final digital output. To precise the remove linear gain error of the residue amplifier and capacitor mismatching error, a digital background calibration technique is used, which is a combination of signal dependent dithering (SDD) and butterfly shuffler. To improve settling time of residue amplifier, a special circuit of voltage separation is used. With the proposed digital background calibration technique, the spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) has been improved to 97.74 dB @30 MHz and 88.9 dB @150 MHz, and the signal-to-noise and distortion ratio (SNDR) has been improved to 79.77 dB @ 30 MHz, and 73.5 dB @ 150 MHz. The implementation of the Pipelined ADC has been completed with technology parameters of 0.18μm CMOS process with 1.8 V supply. Total power consumption is 300 mW by the proposed ADC

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

Methodology for testing high-performance data converters using low-accuracy instruments

There has been explosive growth in the consumer electronics market during the last decade. As the IC industry is shifting from PC-centric to consumer electronics-centric, digital technologies are no longer solving all the problems. Electronic devices integrating mixed-signal, RF and other non-purely digital functions are becoming new challenges to the industry. When digital testing has been studied for long time, testing of analog and mixed-signal circuits is still in its development stage. Existing solutions have two major problems. First, high-performance mixed-signal test equipments are expensive and it is difficult to integrate their functions on chip. Second, it is challenging to improve the test capability of existing methods to keep up with the fast-evolving performance of mixed-signal products demanded on the market. The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors identified mixed-signal testing as one of the most daunting system-on-a-chip challenges;My works have been focused on developing new strategies for testing the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and digital-to-analog converter (DAC). Different from conventional methods that require test instruments to have better performance than the device under test, our algorithms allow the use of medium and low-accuracy instruments in testing. Therefore, we can provide practical and accurate test solutions for high-performance data converters. Meanwhile, the test cost is dramatically reduced because of the low price of such test instruments. These algorithms have the potential for built-in self-test and can be generalized to other mixed-signal circuitries. When incorporated with self-calibration, these algorithms can enable new design techniques for mixed-signal integrated circuits. Following contents are covered in the dissertation:;(1) A general stimulus error identification and removal (SEIR) algorithm that can test high-resolution ADCs using two low-linearity signals with a constant offset in between; (2) A center-symmetric interleaving (CSI) strategy for generating test signals to be used with the SEIR algorithm; (3) An architecture-based test algorithm for high-performance pipelined or cyclic ADCs using a single nonlinear stimulus; (4) Using Kalman Filter to improve the efficiency of ADC testing; and (5) A testing algorithm for high-speed high-resolution DACs using low-resolution ADCs with dithering

Design Techniques for High-Performance SAR A/D Converters

The design of electronics needs to account for the non-ideal characteristics of the device technologies used to realize practical circuits. This is particularly important in mixed analog-digital design since the best device technologies are very different for digital compared to analog circuits. One solution for this problem is to use a calibration correction approach to remove the errors introduced by devices, but this adds complexity and power dissipation, as well as reducing operation speed, and so must be optimised. This thesis addresses such an approach to improve the performance of certain types of analog-to-digital converter (ADC) used in advanced telecommunications, where speed, accuracy and power dissipation currently limit applications. The thesis specifically focuses on the design of compensation circuits for use in successive approximation register (SAR) ADCs. ADCs are crucial building blocks in communication systems, in general, and for mobile networks, in particular. The recently launched fifth generation of mobile networks (5G) has required new ADC circuit techniques to meet the higher speed and lower power dissipation requirements for 5G technology. The SAR has become one of the most favoured architectures for designing high-performance ADCs, but the successive nature of the circuit operation makes it difficult to reach ∼GS/s sampling rates at reasonable power consumption. Here, two calibration techniques for high-performance SAR ADCs are presented. The first uses an on-chip stochastic-based mismatch calibration technique that is able to accurately compute and compensate for the mismatch of a capacitive DAC in a SAR ADC. The stochastic nature of the proposed calibration method enables determination of the mismatch of the CAPDAC with a resolution much better than that of the DAC. This allows the unit capacitor to scale down to as low as 280aF for a 9-bit DAC. Since the CAP-DAC causes a large part of the overall dynamic power consumption and directly determines both the sizes of the driving and sampling switches and the size of the input capacitive load of the ADC and the kT/C noise power, a small CAP-DAC helps the power efficiency. To validate the proposed calibration idea, a 10-bit asynchronous SAR ADC was fabricated in 28-nm CMOS. Measurement results show that the proposed stochastic calibration improves the ADC’s SFDR and SNDR by 14.9 dB, 11.5 dB, respectively. After calibration, the fabricated SAR ADC achieves an ENOB of 9.14 bit at a sampling rate of 85 MS/s, resulting in a Walden FoM of 10.9 fJ/c-s. The second calibration technique is a timing-skew calibration for a time-interleaved (TI) SAR ADC that calibrates/computes the inter-channel timing and offset mismatch simultaneously. Simulation results show the effectiveness of this calibration method. When used together, the proposed mismatch calibration technique and the timing-skew calibration technique enables a TI SAR ADC to be designed that can achieve a sampling rate of ∼GS/s with 10-bit resolution and a power consumption as low as ∼10mW; specifications that satisfy the requirements of 5G technology

Built-in self-test and self-calibration for analog and mixed signal circuits

Analog-to-digital converters (ADC) are one of the most important components in modern electronic systems. In the mission-critical applications such as automotive, the reliability of the ADC is critical as the ADC impacts the system level performance. Due to the aging effect and environmental changes, the performance of the ADC may degrade and even fail to meet the accuracy requirement over time. Built-in self-test (BIST) and self-calibration are becoming the ultimate solution to achieve lifetime reliability. This dissertation introduces two ADC testing algorithms and two ADC built-in self-test circuit implementations to test the ADC integral nonlinearity (INL) and differential nonlinearity (DNL) on-chip. In the first testing algorithm, the ultrafast stimulus error removal and segmented model identification of linearity errors (USER-SMILE) is developed for ADC built-in self-test, which eliminates the need for precision stimulus and reduces the overall test time. In this algorithm, the ADC is tested twice with a nonlinear ramp, instead of using a linear ramp signal. Therefore, the stimulus can be easily generated on-chip in a low-cost way. For the two ramps, there is a constant voltage shift in between. As the input stimulus linearity is completely relaxed, there is no requirement on the waveform of the input stimulus as long as it covers the ADC input range. In the meantime, the high-resolution ADC linearity is modeled with segmented parameters, which reduces the number of samples required for achieving high-precision test, thus saving the test time. As a result, the USER-SMILE algorithm is able to use less than 1 sample/code nonlinear stimulus to test high resolution ADCs with less than 0.5 least significant bit (LSB) INL estimation error, achieving more than 10-time test time reduction. This algorithm is validated with both board-level implementation and on-chip silicon implementation. The second testing algorithm is proposed to test the INL/DNL for multi-bit-per-stages pipelined ADCs with reduced test time and better test coverage. Due to the redundancy characteristics of multi-bit-per-stages pipelined ADC, the conventional histogram test cannot estimate and calibrate the static linearity accurately. The proposed method models the pipelined ADC nonlinearity as segmented parameters with inter-stage gain errors using the raw codes instead of the final output codes. During the test phase, a pure sine wave is sent to the ADC as the input and the model parameters are estimated from the output data with the system identification method. The modeled errors are then removed from the digital output codes during the calibration phase. A high-speed 12-bit pipelined ADC is tested and calibrated with the proposed method. With only 4000 samples, the 12-bit ADC is accurately tested and calibrated to achieve less than 1 LSB INL. The ADC effective number of bits (ENOB) is improved from 9.7 bits to 10.84 bits and the spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) is improved by more than 20dB after calibration. In the first circuit implementation, a low-cost on-chip built-in self-test solution is developed using an R2R digital-to-analog converter (DAC) structure as the signal generator and the voltage shift generator for ADC linearity test. The proposed DAC is a subradix-2 R2R DAC with a constant voltage shift generation capability. The subradix-2 architecture avoids positive voltage gaps caused by mismatches, which relaxes the DAC matching requirements and reduces the design area. The R2R DAC based BIST circuit is fabricated in TSMC 40nm technology with a small area of 0.02mm^2. Measurement results show that the BIST circuit is capable of testing a 15-bit ADC INL accurately with less than 0.5 LSB INL estimation error. In the second circuit implementation, a complete SAR ADC built-in self-test solution using the USER-SMILE is developed and implemented in a 28nm automotive microcontroller. A low-cost 12-bit resistive DAC with less than 12-bit linearity is used as the signal generator to test and calibrate a SAR ADC with a target linearity of 12 bits. The voltage shift generation is created inside the ADC with capacitor switching. The entire algorithm processing unit for USER-SMILE algorithm is also implemented on chip. The final testing results are saved in the memory for further digital calibration. Both the total harmonic distortion (THD) and the SFDR are improved by 20dB after calibration, achieving -84.5dB and 86.5dB respectively. More than 700 parts are tested to verify the robustness of the BIST solution

High Speed and Low Pedestal Error Bootstrapped CMOS Sample and Hold Circuit

A new high speed, low pedestal error bootstrapped CMOS sample and hold (S/H) circuit is proposed for high speed analog-to-digital converter (ADC). The proposed circuit is made up of CMOS transmission gate (TG) switch and two new bootstrap circuits for each transistor in TG switch. Both TG switch and bootstrap circuits are used to decrease channel charge injection and on-resistance input signal dependency. In result, distortion can be reduced. The decrease of channel charge injection input signal dependency also makes the minimizing of pedestal error by adjusting the width of NMOS and PMOS of TG switch possible. The performance of the proposed circuit was evaluated using HSPICE 0.18-m CMOS process. For 50 MHz sinusoidal 1 V peak-to-peak differential input signal with a 1 GHz sampling clock, the proposed circuit achieves 2.75 mV maximum pedestal error, 0.542 mW power consumption, 90.87 dB SNR, 73.50 SINAD which is equal to 11.92 bits ENOB, -73.58 dB THD, and 73.95 dB SFDR

Nyquist-Rate Switched-Capacitor Analog-to-Digital Converters

The miniaturization and digitization of modern microelectronic systems have made Analog-to-Digital converters (ADC) key building components in many applications. Internet and entertainment technologies demand higher and higher performance from the hardware components in many communication and multimedia systems, but at the same time increased mobility demands less and less power consumption. Many applications, such as instrumentation, video, radar and communications, require very high accuracy and speed and with resolutions up to 16 bits and sampling rates in the 100s of MHz, pipelined ADCs are very suitable for such purposes. Resolutions above 10 bits often require very high power consumption and silicon area if no error correction technique is employed. Calibration relaxes the accuracy requirement of the individual building blocks of the ADC and enables power and area savings. Digital calibration is preferred over analog calibration due to higher robustness and accuracy. Furthermore, the microprocessors that process the digital information from the ADCs have constantly reduced cost and power consumption and improved performance due to technology scaling and innovative microprocessor architectures. The work in this dissertation presents a novel digital background calibration technique for high-speed, high-resolution pipelined ADCs. The technique is implemented in a 14 bit, 100 MS/s pipelined ADC fabricated in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) 0.13µm Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) digital technology. The prototype ADC achieves better than 11.5 bits linearity at 100 MS/s and achieves a best-in-class figure of merit of 360 fJ/conversion-step. The core ADC has a power consumption of 105 mW and occupies an active area of 1.25 mm^2. The work in this dissertation also presents a low-power, 8-bit algorithmic ADC. This ADC reduces power consumption at system level by minimizing voltage reference generation and ADC input capacitance. This ADC is implemented in International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) 90nm digital CMOS technology and achieves around 7.5 bits linearity at 0.25 MS/s with a power consumption of 300 µW and an active area of 0.27 mm^2

Accuracy enhancement techniques in low-voltage high-speed pipelined ADC design

Pipelined analog to digital converters (ADCs) are very important building blocks in many electronic systems such as high quality video systems, high performance digital communication systems and high speed data acquisition systems. The rapid development of these applications is driving the design of pipeline ADCs towards higher speed, higher dynamic range, lower power consumption and lower power supply voltage with the CMOS technology scaling. This trend poses great challenges to conventional pipelined ADC designs which rely on high-gain operational amplifiers (opamps) and well matched capacitors to achieve high accuracy. In this thesis, two novel accuracy improvement techniques to overcome the accuracy limit set by analog building blocks (opamps and capacitors) in the context of low-voltage and high-speed pipelined ADC design are presented. One is the time-shifted correlated double sampling (CDS) technique which addresses the finite opamp gain effect and the other is the radix-based background digital calibration technique which can take care of both finite opamp gain and capacitor mismatch. These methods are simple, easy to implement and power efficient. The effectiveness of the proposed techniques is demonstrated in simulation as well as in experiment. Two prototype ADCs have been designed and fabricated in 0.18μm CMOS technology as the experimental verification of the proposed techniques. The first ADC is a 1.8V 10-bit pipeline ADC which incorporated the time-shifted CDS technique to boost the effective gain of the amplifiers. Much better gain-bandwidth tradeoff in amplifier design is achieved with this gain boosting. Measurement results show total power consumption of 67mW at 1.8V when operating at 100MSPS. The SNR, SNDR and SFDR are 55dB, 54dB and 65dB respectively given a 1MHz input signal. The second one is a 0.9V 12-bit two-stage cyclic ADC which employed a novel correlation-based background calibration to enhance the linearity. The linearity limit set by the capacitor mismatches, finite opamp gain effects is exceeded. After calibration, the SFDR is improved by about 33dB and exceeds 80dB. The power consumption is 12mW from 0.9V supply when operating at 2MSPS