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

Intelligent Scoliosis Screening and Diagnosis: A Survey

Scoliosis is a three-dimensional spinal deformity, which may lead to abnormal morphologies, such as thoracic deformity, and pelvic tilt. Severe patients may suffer from nerve damage and urinary abnormalities. At present, the number of scoliosis patients in primary and secondary schools has exceeded five million in China, the incidence rate is about 3% to 5% which is growing every year. The research on scoliosis, therefore, has important clinical value. This paper systematically introduces computer-assisted scoliosis screening and diagnosis as well as analyzes the advantages and limitations of different algorithm models in the current issue field. Moreover, the paper also discusses the current development bottlenecks in this field and looks forward to future development trends.Comment: in Chinese languag