28.7 A 0.7V 12b 160MS/s 12.8fJ/conv-step pipelined-SAR ADC in 28nm CMOS with digital amplifier technique

Wireless standards, e.g. 802.11ac Wave 2 and 802.11ax draft, aim to boost user throughput to cope with growing data traffic. High-speed (fs>100MS/s) and high-resolution (ENOB>9.5b) ADCs are essential for leading-edge wireless SoCs, given the bandwidth and PAPR specifications. Also, low power dissipation (FoM<20fJ/conv) is crucial for mobile applications. A number of pipelined-SAR ADCs have been presented which satisfy these design targets [1–3]. However, in deep submicron CMOS, design of a high DC-gain opamp for the MDAC is a serious obstacle due to reduced intrinsic transistor gain and sub-1V supply voltage. Hence, all designs utilize digital calibration to counter gain error and tolerate the use of a low-gain amplifier. Calibration times of at least several tens of ms are required, resulting in lengthy start-up times and reduced SoC power efficiency. Moreover, such calibration cannot track sudden supply voltage variations and suppressing such fluctuations with bypass capacitors significantly impacts chip cost [1–2]. Furthermore, amplifier non-linearity remains unsolved; with lower supply voltages, the limited amplifier swing tightens SAR noise requirements.