Top-down design verification of subranging pipelined analog-to-digital converter

• Main Author: Wang, Jin Ling
• Other Authors: Siek Liter
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Electronic circuits
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/40888
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

High-speed high resolution analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is the key design blocks in mixed-signal chip design since the ADC is an interface between digital signal processing systems and the analog world. With the rapid advancement of CMOS fabrication technology, more and more signal-processing functions are implemented in the digital domain for a lower cost, lower power consumption, higher yield, and higher re-configurability. This has recently generated a great demand for low-power ADCs that can be realized in a mainstream deep sub-micrometer CMOS technology. On the other hand, since analog circuits tend to be sensitive to fluctuations in temperature and the fabrication process, circuit designers are forced to allow for a wide margin to ensure the desired operation of all the chips under various conditions. Therefore, if the margins can be minimized, both reduction of power dissipation and a higher yield in mass production can be achieved. To tap onto the waves of the rapid booming wireless communication markets, high resolution and high speed A/D converter is required at very low power consumption. Providing the wanted resolution at the required speed for the minimum power consumption and silicon cost is what's driving the use of specific A/D architectures [1]. Architectures that have been applied include flash, subranging, successive approximation, sigma-delta and pipelined. Each of these architectures has their specific advantages and drawbacks. Pipelined architecture poised as a suitable candidate since the power consumption will be an order of magnitude better comparing to flash ADC, subranging ADC, successive approximation ADC and oversampling ADC. Moreover, a correction algorithm can be employed to compensate for the errors in the sub-ADC. Shooting for even higher speed, parallelism is required to be incorporated into pipelined structure. Hence, in this work, a feasibility study of a novel subranging pipelined A/D converter with 100 MS/s and 8-bit resolution is conducted. This research describes the design of a 8-bit 100 MS/s subranging pipelined analog-to-digital converter(ADC) suitable for wide-range applications. To achieve the wide-range performance, this work purposes a novel architectural design at both system and circuit levels. At the device level, device modeling and active components characterisations are carefully studied. Thin gate oxide, NFET is fabricated in Chartered 90nm CMOS process. The results showed that the models used in SPIC simulation correlate well with the measured results except at the end of high VDD where breakdown is seen in the measured results but not during simulation. At the circuit level, a 3-bit coarse ADC and a 6-bit fine ADC are developed. Logic designs are also carried out. At the system level, this work investigates the effects of ADC design parameters such as DNL and INL in the static DC aspects and SFDR and ENOB in the dynamic AC aspects. A top-down design methodology is adopted in this work. The behavioral modelling results verify the success of the proposed architecture. The simulation results showed that the designed ADC is able to achieve a 7.4 effective bits out of 8 bit resolution.