Ameya Bhide

A 53-nW 9.1-ENOB 1-kS/s SAR ADC in 0.13-

This paper describes an ultra-low power SAR ADC for medical implant devices. To achieve the nano-watt range power consumption, an ultra-low power design strategy has been utilized, imposing maximum simplicity on the ADC architecture, low transistor count and matched capacitive DAC with a switching scheme which results in full-range sampling without switch bootstrapping and extra reset voltage. Furthermore, a dual-supply voltage scheme allows the SAR logic to operate at 0.4 V, reducing the overall power consumption of the ADC by 15% without any loss in performance. The ADC was fabricated in 0.13-μm CMOS. In dual-supply mode (1.0 V for analog and 0.4 V for digital), the ADC consumes 53 nW at a sampling rate of 1 kS/s and achieves the ENOB of 9.1 bits. The leakage power constitutes 25% of the 53-nW total power.

\mu

This brief presents an 8-GS/s 12-bit input ΔΣ digital-to-analog converter (DAC) with 200-MHz bandwidth in 65-nm CMOS. The high sampling rate is achieved by a two-channel interleaved MASH 1-1 digital ΔΣ modulator with 3-bit output, resulting in a highly digital DAC with only seven current cells. The two-channel interleaving allows the use of a single clock for both the logic and the final multiplexing. This requires each channel to operate at half the sampling rate, which is enabled by a high-speed pipelined MASH structure with robust static logic. Measurement results show that the DAC achieves 200-MHz bandwidth, 26-dB SNDR, and -57-dBc IMD3, with a power consumption of 68 mW at 1-V digital and 1.2-V analog supplies. This architecture shows potential for use in transmitter baseband for wideband wireless communication.

m CMOS for Medical Implant Devices

This paper deals with the design of CMOS sampling switch for ultra-low power analog-to-digital converters (ADC) in biomedical applications. General switch design constraints are analyzed, among which the voltage droop due to the subthreshold leakage current constitutes the major error source for low-speed sampling circuits. Based on the analyses, a CMOS sampling switch with leakagereduction has been designed for a 10-bit 1-kS/s successive approximation (SA) ADC in a standard 130 nm CMOS process. Post-layout simulation shows that the ADC with the proposed switch offers an effective number of bits (ENOB) of 9.5 while consuming only 64 nW.

An 8-GS/s 200-MHz Bandwidth 68-mW

This work presents an 11 GS/s 1.1 GHz bandwidth interleaved ΔΣ DAC in 65 nm CMOS for the 60 GHz radio baseband. The high sample rate is achieved by using a two-channel interleaved MASH 1-1 architecture with a 4 bit output resulting in a predominantly digital DAC with only 15 analog current cells. Two-channel interleaving allows the use of a single clock for the logic and the multiplexing which requires each channel to operate at half sampling rate of 5.5 GHz. To enable this, a look-ahead technique is proposed that decouples the two channels within the integrator feedback path thereby improving the speed as compared to conventional loop-unrolling. Measurement results show that the ΔΣ DAC achieves a 53 dB SFDR, -49 dBc IM3 and 39 dB SNDR within a 1.1 GHz bandwidth while consuming 117 mW from 1 V digital/1.2 V analog supplies. Furthermore, the proposed ΔΣ DAC can satisfy the spectral mask of the IEEE 802.11ad WiGig standard with a second order reconstruction filter.

\Delta\Sigma

Time-interleaved delta-sigma (ΔΣ) modulation digital-to-analog converters (TIDSM DACs) have the potential for a wideband operation. The performance of a two-channel interleaved ΔΣ DAC is very sensitive to the duty cycle of the half-rate clock. This brief presents a closed-form expression for the signal-to-noise-plus-distortion ratio (SNDR) loss of such DACs due to a duty-cycle error for modulators with a noise transfer function of (1 - z-1)n. Adding a low-order finite-impulse-response filter after the modulator helps to mitigate this problem. A closed-form expression for the SNDR loss in the presence of this filter is also developed. These expressions are useful for choosing a suitable modulator and filter order for an interleaved ΔΣ DAC in the early stage of the design process.

DAC in 65-nm CMOS

Time-interleaved ΔΣ DACs have the potential for wideband and high-speed operation. Their SNR is limited by the timing skew between the output delays of the channels to the output. In a two-channel interleaved ΔΣ DAC, the channel skew arises from the duty cycle error in the half sample rate clock. The effects of timing skew error can be mitigated by hold interleaving, digital pre-filtering or compensation in the form of analog post-correction or digital pre-correction. This paper presents a comparative study of these techniques for two-channel interleaving and the trade-offs are investigated. First order FIR pre-filtering is found to be a suitable solution with a moderate DAC matching penalty of one bit. Higher order pre-filtering achieves a near immunity to timing skew at the cost of higher matching penalty. Correction techniques are found to be less effective than pre-filtering and not well suited for high-speed implementation.

Design of CMOS sampling switch for ultra-low power ADCs in biomedical applications

Implementation of wireless wideband transmitters using ΔΣ DACs requires very high speed modulators. Digital MASH ΔΣ modulators are good candidates for speed enhancement using interleaving because they require only adders and can be cascaded. This paper presents an analysis of the integrator critical path of two-channel interleaved ΔΣ modulators. The bottlenecks for a high-speed operation are identified and the performance of different logic styles is compared. Static combinational logic shows the best trade-off and potential for use in such high speed modulators. A prototype 12-bit second order MASH ΔΣ modulator designed in 65 nm CMOS technology based on this study achieves 9 GHz operation at 1 V supply.