Low Voltage, Low Power Folding Amplifier for Folding & Interpolating ADC

The folding and interpolating ADC has speed advantage similar to flash ADC with reduced complexity. The folding amplifier can be used to produce more than one zero-crossing point to reduce required number of comparators. This paper presents simple low voltage, low power folding amplifier with folding factor=4 for folding and interpolating ADC. The design is implemented using 0.13 um technology at 1.5 V supply voltage. The simulation results are compared with voltage mode (conventional differential pair based) folding amplifier and current steering folding amplifier. In order to achieve low power, glitches are reduced. The simulation result indicates that the proposed folding amplifier work faster compared to other two designs.