A CMOS analog front-end for driving a high-speed SAR ADC in low-power ultrasound imaging systems

Abstract

In recent studies of ultrasound imaging systems, successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are suggested as an alternative architecture for low-power ultrasound receiver integrated circuits. However, the sampling period of a high-speed SAR ADC is very short - less than a few nanoseconds. This results in the need of a very wide unity-gain bandwidth of the amplifier in the anti-aliasing filter (AAF), and it also causes more serious kick-back noise. In this paper, a single-channel analog front-end (AFE) with a RC filter for a high-speed SAR ADC is presented. The RC filter relaxes the bandwidth requirement of the amplifier in the AAF by 16% and reduces kick-back noise coming from the ADC input. The proposed AFE is fabricated in 0.18µm CMOS process. The design achieves 5.05nV/√Hz input-referred noise density and the voltage gain is controlled in the range of [−3.02, 30.6] dB in a linear-in-dB scale with 16 steps by a 4-bit digital code. Our AFE circuit consumes 30mA from a 1.8V supply.