A 15-b, 5-Msample/s low-spurious CMOS ADC

A 5-5-5-6-b pipelined analog-to-digital converter (ADC) architecture alleviates the requirements for initial capacitor matching and residue amplifier settling accuracy. The two 5-b most significant bit (MSB) stages are digitally calibrated to implement a 15-b, 5-Msample/s low-spurious ADC using 1.4-μm CMOS. A skip-and-fill algorithm with nonlinear interpolation also opens up the possibility of calibrating ADC's in the background synchronously with their normal operation. Interpolation results for the background calibration are compared with the foreground calibration results. The prototype ADC exhibits a differential nonlinearity (DNL) of +0.75/-0.6 least significant bit (LSB), an integral nonlinearity (INL) of +1.77/-1.58 LSB, and all spurious components are suppressed to below -93 dB when sampled at 5 MHz. The chip occupies 27 mm², and the analog part consumes 60 mW at 5 V. Memory and arithmetic units for calibration are supplied externally in testing