Digitally Assisted Pipeline ADCs

With the advent of powerful digital signal processing in portable electronic applications, we have seen a growing, unsatisfied demand for power efficient, high-speed and high-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). While technology scaling has led to revolutionary gains in digital computing power and energy efficiency, progress in analog-to-digital conversion interfaces has been comparatively slow. Digitally Assisted Pipeline ADCs: Theory and Implementation explores the opportunity to reduce ADC power dissipation by leveraging digital signal processing capabilities in fine line integrated circuit technology. The described digitally assisted pipelined ADC uses a statistics-based system identification technique as an enabling element to replace precision residue amplifiers with simple open-loop gain stages. The digital compensation of analog circuit distortion eliminates one key factor in the classical noise-speed-linearity constraint loop and thereby enables a significant power reduction. Digitally Assisted Pipeline ADCs: Theory and Implementation describes in detail the implementation and measurement results of a 12-bit, 75-MSample/sec proof-of-concept prototype. The Experi