A real-time pseudo-background gain calibration strategy for residue amplifiers of pipeline ADCs

Precision amplifiers dominate the power dissipation in most high-speed pipelined analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). We propose a digital background calibration technique as an enabling element to replace precision amplifiers by simple power-efficient open-loop stages. In the multibit first stage of a 12-bit 75-MSamples/s proof-of-concept prototype, we achieve more than 60% residue amplifier power savings over a conventional implementation. The ADC has been fabricated in a 0.35-μm double-poly q...

The proposed digital background calibration scheme, applicable to multistage (pipelined or algorithmic/cyclic) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), corrects the linearity errors resulting from capacitor mismatches and finite opamp gain. A high-accuracy calibration is achieved by recalculating the digital output based on each stage's equivalent radix. The equivalent radices are extracted in the background by using a digital correlation method. The proposed calibration technique takes advantage of...

A 1.8-V 15-bit 40-MSample/s CMOS pipelined analog-to-digital converter with 90-dB spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) and 72-dB peak signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) over the full Nyquist band is presented. Its differential and integral nonlinearities are 0.25 LSB and 1.5 LSB, respectively, and its power consumption is 400 mW. This performance is enabled by digital background calibration of internal digital-to-analog converter (DAC) noise and interstage gain errors. The calibration achieves improvemen...

We present an adaptive digital technique to calibrate pipelined analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). Rather than achieving linearity by adjustment of analog component values, the new approach infers component errors from conversion results and applies digital postprocessing to correct those results. The scheme proposed here draws close analogy to the channel equalization problem commonly encountered in digital communications. We show that, with the help of a slow but accurate ADC, the proposed c...

A background self-calibration technique is proposed that can correct both linear and nonlinear errors in the interstage amplifiers of pipeline and algorithmic analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). Stage redundancy in a pipeline architecture is exploited to measure gain errors that are corrected using digital post-processing. The proposed technique allows faster convergence and has less dependence on input signal statistics than a similar technique described by Murmann and Boser. Simulation result...

Pseudo-random dithers have been used to measure capacitor mismatch and opamp gain errors of the pipelined analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in background and to calibrate them digitally. However, this error measurement suffers from signal range reduction and long signal decorrelation time. A signal-dependent dithering scheme allows the injection of a large dither without sacrificing the signal range and shortens the signal decorrelation time. A 1.5-bit multiplying digital-to-analog converter (MD...

The continuous calibration of high-linearity, highspeed analog/digital converters (ADCs) can minimize system complexity by allowing a single converter to maintain its accuracy over time. This paper introduces a continuous calibration technique for pipelined and successive approximation ADCs that avoids some of the limitations of earlier designs by performing the calibration in the analog domain. The calibration is made transparent to the overall system by employing an extra stage that is calibra...

This brief presents a digital background calibration technique that embraces comparator decision time to calibrate interstage gain errors and capacitor mismatches in pipelined analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). It does not modify the original analog signal path except for the addition of a comparator decision time binary quantizer built by simple digital gates. The technique does not limit either the ADC input signal swing or bandwidth. Simulation results for a 12-bit pipelined ADC show that t...

A method of indirect background digital calibration of the dominant static nonlinearities in pipelined analog-to-digital converters (ADC) is presented. The method, called decision boundary gap estimation (DBGE), monitors the output of the ADC to estimate the size of code gaps that result at the decision boundaries of each stage. Code gaps result from such effects as capacitor mismatch, finite opamp gain, finite current source output impedance, comparator offset, and charge injection. DBGE does n...

A new digital distortion calibration technique is demonstrated in a 14-bit 20-MS/s pipelined analog-to-digital converter (ADC). Calibration parameters are obtained in a way similar to conventional digital gain calibration. The prototype ADC has been fabricated in a 0.18-mum CMOS process and consumes 33.7 mW at 2.8 V. Using the proposed calibration method, a 15-dB improvement of the third-order harmonic rejection is achieved. The measured SNDR and SFDR are 71.6 and 82.3 dB, respectively