Analysis of the averaging technique in flash ADCs

The averaging technique is used in flash analog-to-digital converters to reduce non-linearities resulting from random offset voltages of the pre-amplifiers, which stand before the comparators. The main contribution of this paper is to provide further insight into this technique through exact closed form expressions obtained for the output voltage, gain and offset in averaged pre-amplifiers. The results obtained from these expressions are compared with HSPICE simulations, and a very good agreement is found.