An 80 MS/s 70.8 dB-SNDR Radiation-Tolerant Semi-Time-Interleaved Pipelined-SAR ADC for Space Applications

In addition to the conventional ADC design tradeoffs between power, speed, and accuracy, radiation tolerance is the fourth factor for ADCs used in radiation environments. This paper describes radiation-tolerant (RT) ADC design tradeoffs and design strategies. Then, the paper introduces a 13-bit RT pipelined-successive-approximation register (pipelined-SAR) ADC fabricated in 65 nm CMOS technology based on the concluded tradeoffs. To further improve the ADC power efficiency, a semi-time-interleaved (Semi-TI) structure is employed. Besides, the ping-pong auto-zeroing (AZ) scheme is implemented in the residue amplifier (RA) to reduce the TID-induced offset while maintaining low power dissipation. The proposed ADC is designed and hardened against Single Event Effects (SEEs) and Total Ionizing Dose (TID) effects from the structure to layout levels. All sub-blocks were examined, and only the critical blocks were hardened to avoid over-hardening. From the measurement results, the prototype ADC attains an 80 MS/s sampling rate and achieves 70.8-dB SNDR and 80.3-dB SFDR at the Nyquist input frequency. With a total power consumption of 13.8 mW, the prototype ADC establishes a state-of-the-art Walden Figure of Merit of 60.7 fJ/conv step, yielding an efficiency comparable to non-RT ADCs with similar specifications. Irradiation tests validate the consistent performance of the ADC up to a cumulative dose of 500 krad (Si) in X-ray testing, while laser testing indicates a robust SEE threshold and swift post-SEE recovery.