Power Dissipation Bounds for High-Speed Nyquist Analog-to-Digital Converters
Sundstrom, T.; Murmann, B.; Svensson, C.
Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers, IEEE Transactions on
Volume 56, Issue 3, March 2009 Page(s):509 - 518
Digital Object Identifier   10.1109/TCSI.2008.2002548
Summary:A very important limitation of high-speed analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is their power dissipation. ADC power dissipation has been examined several times, mostly empirically. In this paper, we present an attempt to estimate a lower bound for the power of ADCs, based on first principles and using pipeline and flash architectures as examples. We find that power dissipation of high-resolution ADCs is bound by noise, whereas technology is the limiting factor for low-resolution devices. Our model assumes the use of digital error correction, but we also study an example on the power penalty due to matching requirements. A comparison with published experimental data indicates that the best ADCs use about 50 times the estimated minimum power. Two published ADCs are used for a more detailed comparison between the minimum bound and today's designs.

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