A study on switched-capacitor blocks for reconfigurable ADCs

Abstract

Pipelined analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) achieve low to moderate resolutions at high bandwidths while sigma-delta (ΣΔ) ADCs provide high resolution at moderate bandwidths. A switched-capacitor (SC) block which can function as an integrator or an MDAC can be used to implement a reconfigurable ADC (R-ADC) which supports both these types of architectures. Through the use of high level models this work attempts to derive the capacitance and critical opamp parameters such as DC gain and bandwidth of the SC blocks in a reconfigurable ADC. Scaling of capacitance afforded by the noise shaping property of ΣΔ loops as well as the inter-stage gain of pipelined ADCs is used to minimize the total capacitance. This work can be used as reference material to understand some of the design trade-offs in R-ADCs.