Circuit-Level Design, Implementation, and Verification

This chapter gives some design issues and practical recipes to complete the design flow of ?>?> modulator. It deals with macromodel implementation of ?>?>Ms as an essential design stage to relate behavioral-level models with circuit-level description. Then, it describes how to include circuit noise in electrical-level simulations of ?>?>Ms, and shows how to process the modulator output data extracted from electrical simulations in SPICE-like simulators, in order to characterize the performance of ?>?>Ms. Next, the chapter moves down to the transistor-level implementation, giving a number of practical design guidelines and describing diverse simulation test benches to properly design and characterize the performance of basic ?>?> building blocks (CMOS Switches, operational amplifiers, transconductors, comparators, and current-steering DACs). Other auxiliary circuits needed to implement ?>?>Ms are also discussed. Finally, the chapter deals with some of the most important design issues related to the layout, prototyping, and testing of high-performance ?>?>Ms.