A low power 20 GHz comparator in 90 nm COMS technology

Abstract

A low power 20 GHz CMOS dynamic latched regeneration comparator for ultra-high-speed, low-power analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is proposed. The time constant in both the tracking and regeneration phases of the latch are analyzed based on the small signal model. A dynamic source-common logic (SCL) topology is adopted in the master-slave latch to increase the tracking and regeneration speeds. Implemented in 90 nm CMOS technology, this comparator only occupies a die area of 65 × 150 μm2 with a power dissipation of 14 mW from a 1.2 V power supply. The measurement results show that the comparator can work up to 20 GHz. Operating with an input frequency of 1 GHz, the circuit can oversample up to 20 Giga-sampling-per-second (GSps) with 5 bits resolution; while operating at Nyquist, the comparator can sample up to 20 GSps with 4 bits resolution. The comparator has been successfully used in a 20 GSps flash ADC and the circuit can be also used in other high speed applications.