This paper presents a 7-bit 1.5-GS/s time-interleaved (TI) SAR ADC. The scheme achieves better isolation between sub-ADCs thanks to embedding a track-and-hold (T/H) amplifier and reference voltage buffer in each sub-ADC. The proposed dynamic T/H circuit enables high-speed, low-power operation. The prototype is fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS technology. The total active area is 0.14,mm2 and the ADC consumes 36 mW from a 1.2-V supply. The measured results show the peak spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) and signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio (SNDR) are 52.4 dB and 39.6 dB, respectively, and an figure of Merit (FoM) of 300 fJ/conv. is achieved.

The RC mismatch among S/H stages for time-interleaved ADCs causes a phase error and a gain error and the phase error is dominant. The paper points out that clock skew and the phase error caused by the RC mismatch have similar effects on the sampling error and then can be compensated with the clock skew compensation. Simulation results agree well with the theoretical analysis. With the phase error compensation of RC mismatch, the SNDR in 14b ADC can be improved by more than 15 dB in the case that the bandwidth of S/H circuits is 3 times the sampling frequency. This paper also proposes a method of clock skew and RC mismatch compensation in time-interleaved sample-and-hold (S/H) circuits by sampling clock phase adjusting.

A digital calibration technique, which corrects errors due to capacitor mismatch in pipelined ADC and directly measures the error coefficients using the ADC INL plot, is described. The proposed technique can be applied for various types of pipelined ADC architectures. Test results using an implemented 10-bit pipelined ADC show that the ADC achieves a peak signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio of 56.5 dB, a peak integral non-linearity of 0.3 LSB, and a peak differential non-linearity of 0.3 LSB using the digital calibration.

This paper presents an analog front-end circuit for a 60-GHz proximity wireless communication receiver. The feature of the proposed analog front-end circuit is a bandwidth more than 1-GHz wide. To expand the bandwidth of a low-pass filter and a voltage gain amplifier, a technique to reduce the parasitic capacitance of a transconductance amplifier is proposed. Since the bandwidth is also limited by on-resistance of the ADC sampling switch, a switch separation technique for reduction of the on-resistance is also proposed. In a high-speed ADC, the SNDR is limited by the sampling jitter. The developed high resolution VCO auto tuning effectively reduces the jitter of PLL. The prototype is fabricated in 65nm CMOS. The analog front-end circuit achieves over 1-GHz bandwidth and 27.2-dB SNDR with 224mW Power consumption.

In this paper, low-power design techniques of high-speed A/D converters are reviewed and discussed. Pipeline and parallel-pipeline architectures are treated as these are dominant architectures when required high sampling rate and high resolution with reasonable power dissipation. A systematic approach to the power optimization of pipeline and parallel pipeline ADC's is introduced based on models of noise analysis and response time of a building block in the multiple-stage pipeline ADC. Finally, the theoretical minimum of required power as functions of the sampling rate, resolution and SNR is discussed. The analysis shows that, with the developments of new circuits and systems to approach to the minimum, the power can be further reduced by a factor of more than 1/10 without changing the basic architectures.

A new gain enhancement technique for an operational amplifier (opamp) using a replica amplifier is presented to reduce a sensitivity of a gain mismatch between the main amplifier and the replica amplifier which limits a gain-enhancement factor in the conventional replica-amp techniques. In the proposed technique, the replica amplifier is used to only amplify an error voltage of the main amplifier. The outputs of the main amplifier and the replica amplifier are added to cancel the error voltage of the main amplifier. The proposed technique can also achieve a higher output voltage swing because the replica amplifier amplifies only the error voltage. In case of using a fully-differential common-source opamp for the main amplifier and a telescopic opamp for the replica amplifier, Monte Carlo simulation at 100 iterations shows that the proposed amplifier has almost the same gain variation with 15.5dB gain enhancement and about five times output voltage swing expanding for a supply voltage of 1.2V compared with the single closed-loop amplifier using the telescopic opamp.