A 12-bit 75-MS/s pipelined ADC using open-loop residue amplification

Precision amplifiers dominate the power dissipation in most high-speed pipelined analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). We propose a digital background calibration technique as an enabling element to replace precision amplifiers by simple power-efficient open-loop stages. In the multibit first stage of a 12-bit 75-MSamples/s proof-of-concept prototype, we achieve more than 60% residue amplifier power savings over a conventional implementation. The ADC has been fabricated in a 0.35-μm double-poly quadruple-metal CMOS technology and achieves typical differential and integral nonlinearity within 0.5 LSB and 0.9 LSB, respectively. At Nyquist input frequencies, the measured signal-to-noise ratio is 67 dB and the total harmonic distortion is -74 dB. The IC consumes 290 mW at 3 V and occupies 7.9 mm².