A Very-Front-End ADC for the Electromagnetic Calorimeter of the International Linear Collider

A 10-bit pipeline analog-to-digital converter is introduced in this paper and the measurements carried out on prototypes produced in a 0.35 m CMOS technology are presented. This ADC is a building block of the very-front-end electronics dedicated to the electromagnetic calorimeter of the International Linear Collider (ILC). Based on a 1.5-bit per stage resolution architecture, it reaches the 10-bit accuracy at a sampling rate of 4 MSamples/s with a consumption of 35 mW. The Integral and Differential Non-Linearity obtained are respectively within LSB and LSB, and the measured noise is 0.47 LSB r.m.s. The performance obtained confirms that the pipeline architecture ADC is suitable to the requirements of the readout electronics of the electromagnetic calorimeter.