COURSE OUTLINE

This course addresses practical circuit design and layout techniques for successful implementation of advanced analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) with an in-depth discussion of circuit nonidealities.

The course begins by studying the essential building blocks for ADCs: sampling circuits and comparators. Various key concepts, including bandwidth, linearity, noise, top/bottom-plate sampling, boosting, offset reduction will be analyzed.

Then, we will focus on two representative Nyquist ADC architectures, Successive-Approximation Register (SAR) ADC and Pipelined ADC, starting from their fundamental concept to the state-of-the-art design and layout techniques.

More specifically, in SAR ADCs, we will discuss nonlinearity and switching energy of digital-to-analog converters (DACs), decision redundancies for error correction including integer-based non-binary SAR decision, architectural modifications for speed enhancement, and calibration techniques for performance robustness.

Time-interleaved (TI) ADCs and the channel mismatch issues will be also studied followed by mismatch calibration techniques.

In pipelined ADCs, we will address the residue inaccuracy issues and how various error sources in a residue amplifier (RA) or a multiplying-DAC (MDAC) affect the nonlinearity profile. Then, there will be a review of how pipelined ADCs have evolved, with a special focus on the RA design. Recent advanced design techniques, including pipelined-SAR ADCs and calibration schemes for residue inaccuracy compensation will be discussed.

The final lecture of the course is dedicated to practical tips for ADC circuit simulations and test measurements, including clock generation, power-supply separation, linearity measurement, FFT.

Each lecture includes design case studies and examples. There will also be a focus on design methodologies and good layout practice.

This course is intended primarily for analog designers with some experience in data converter design who do not have experience with advanced ADC design techniques. We will assume no familiarity with these advanced design techniques and introduce them throughout the course.