Architectural Exploration and Design of Time-Interleaved SAR Arrays for Low-Power and High Speed A/D Converters

Sergio SAPONARA  Pierluigi NUZZO  Claudio NANI  Geert VAN DER PLAS  Luca FANUCCI 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics  Vol.E92-C  No.6  pp.843-851
Publication Date: 2009/06/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1353
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Analog Circuits and Related SoC Integration Technologies)
Category: 
Keyword: 
A/D converters,  time interleaving,  analog CMOS circuits,  system level design,  SAR,  low power design, 

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Summary: 
Time-interleaved (TI) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are frequently advocated as a power-efficient solution to realize the high sampling rates required in single-chip transceivers for the emerging communication schemes: ultra-wideband, fast serial links, cognitive-radio and software-defined radio. However, the combined effects of multiple distortion sources due to channel mismatches (bandwidth, offset, gain and timing) severely affect system performance and power consumption of a TI ADC and need to be accounted for since the earlier design phases. In this paper, system-level design of TI ADCs is addressed through a platform-based methodology, enabling effective investigation of different speed/resolution scenarios as well as the impact of parallelism on accuracy, yield, sampling-rate, area and power consumption. Design space exploration of a TI successive approximation ADC is performed top-down via Monte Carlo simulations, by exploiting behavioral models built bottom-up after characterizing feasible implementations of the main building blocks in a 90-nm 1-V CMOS process. As a result, two implementations of the TI ADC are proposed that are capable to provide an outstanding figure-of-merit below 0.15 pJ/conversion-step.