Description of SAR ADCs with Digital Redundancy using a Unified Hardware-Based Approach

This paper analyzes the state-of-the-art in Successive-Approximation-Register (SAR) ADCs with digital redundancy using a unified nomenclature and modeling. Redundancy provides tolerance intervals for dealing with comparison errors during the SAR search algorithm due to incomplete settling in the DAC. Employing redundancy improves conversion speed/power trade-off as well as relaxes switch sizes and comparator design. The proposed description presents a common theoretical and physical framework for analyzing existing (apparently different) techniques in the bibliography, independently of the practical realization (binary or arbitrary scaled capacitors with redundant bits) and switching schemes. Several examples are modeled and simulated using the proposed approach.