Analysis of Linearity in FD-SOI Body-Input Voltage Controlled Ring Oscillators – Application to ADCs

Abstract

This paper studies the use of the body terminal as control voltage of ring oscillators implemented in Fully Depleted Silicon on Insulator (FD-SOI) CMOS. This technology allows to increase the body factor with respect to conventional (bulk) processes, thus allowing a wider tuning range of the threshold voltage. This effect is exploited in this work to improve the linearity of Voltage-Controlled Ring Oscillators (VCROs) to be used as building blocks of Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs). An intuitive analysis of basic VCRO current-starved inverter cells is carried out in order to derive an approximate expression of the voltage-to-frequency characteristic. Electrical simulations in a 28-nm node are shown to get insight about the influence of main design parameters. These circuit techniques are applied to the design of VCRO-based ΣΔ ADCs up to the layout level, whose performance metrics demonstrate the benefits of the presented approach1.