A TIME-DOMAIN 1.0-V/0.8-MW 6-BIT 125 MS/S FLASH ADC IN 65 NM CMOS

Abstract

A 6-bit low-voltage power-efficient flash analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is presented in this paper. The proposed ADC replaces the conventional voltage comparator with a new approach in the time-domain. The reference voltages and the analog input voltage are converted to digital signal in a form of different pulse widths by using a pulse-width-modulation (PWM) circuit. Consequently, the comparison is achieved by checking the sequence of the pulse rising edges rather than amplifying and latching the voltage difference. The total input capacitance of the proposed ADC is as small as tens of femto-farads, resulting in much less demand for the front-end buffer and the sampling switch. In addition, an implementation of the digital foreground calibration helps to get rid of the nonmonotonic comparison thresholds due to mismatch. The calibration operates with the adaptive comparison threshold by tuning the modulation level of the PWM. The intermediate Gray code conversion increases the bubble tolerance by 1LSB. This digital-circuit-heavily-involved ADC has been designed and simulated in a 65 nm CMOS process, achieving 35.24 dB signal-to-noise-and-distortion-ratio (SNDR) at a sampling rate of 125 MS/s while consuming 803 μW from 1 V power supply. As a result, the figure of merit (FoM) is as low as 136 fJ/conversion-step.