Design of high speed folding and interpolating analog-to-digital converter
Date
2004-09-30
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Texas A&M University
Abstract
High-speed and low resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADC) are key elements in
the read channel of optical and magnetic data storage systems. The required resolution is
about 6-7 bits while the sampling rate and effective resolution bandwidth requirements
increase with each generation of storage system. Folding is a technique to reduce the
number of comparators used in the flash architecture. By means of an analog preprocessing
circuit in folding A/D converters the number of comparators can be reduced significantly.
Folding architectures exhibit low power and low latency as well as the ability to run at high
sampling rates. Folding ADCs employing interpolation schemes to generate extra folding
waveforms are called "Folding and Interpolating ADC" (F&I ADC).
The aim of this research is to increase the input bandwidth of high speed conversion, and
low latency F&I ADC. Behavioral models are developed to analyze the bandwidth
limitation at the architecture level. A front-end sample-and-hold unit is employed to tackle
the frequency multiplication problem, which is intrinsic for all F&I ADCs. Current-mode
signal processing is adopted to increase the bandwidth of the folding amplifiers and
interpolators, which are the bottleneck of the whole system. An operational
transconductance amplifier (OTA) based folding amplifier, current mirror-based
interpolator, very low impedance fast current comparator are proposed and designed to
carry out the current-mode signal processing. A new bit synchronization scheme is
proposed to correct the error caused by the delay difference between the coarse and fine
channels.
A prototype chip was designed and fabricated in 0.35μm CMOS process to verify the
ideas. The S/H and F&I ADC prototype is realized in 0.35μm double-poly CMOS process
(only one poly is used). Integral nonlinearity (INL) is 1.0 LSB and Differential nonlinearity
(DNL) is 0.6 LSB at 110 KHz. The ADC occupies 1.2mm2 active area and dissipates
200mW (excluding 70mW of S/H) from 3.3V supply. At 300MSPS sampling rate, the ADC
achieves no less than 6 ENOB with input signal lower than 60MHz. It has the highest input
bandwidth of 60MHz reported in the literature for this type of CMOS ADC with similar
resolution and sample rate.
Description
Keywords
folding, interpolation, analog to digital converter