A pseudo-flash ADC for large-channel-volume biomedical sensing applications

This paper describes an ADC architecture termed pseudo-flash ADC and intended for biomedical sensing applications. It features high conversion speed which is the same as that of flash ADC, but has significantly lower hardware implementation overhead. Designed in a 0.18-µm standard CMOS technology in accordance with a specification of 250 KSamples/s and 6-bit resolution, the proposed ADC architecture consumes a total of nearly 290 µWunder the nominal supply voltage of 1.8 V, without the requirement of a large number of comparators as compared with the conventional flash ADC architecture.