A Novel Approach to Design SAR-ADC: Design Partitioning Method

This paper presents a successive approximation register analog-to-digital converter (SAR-ADC) design optimization platform. A novel ADC modeling approach, design partitioning method (DPM), is used in the proposed platform. It uses lookup tables along with conventional behavioral modeling technique, which captures the design parameters and process nonidealities. An individualistic as well as collective study of the impact of these parameters and nonidealities on the performance of SAR-ADC has been carried out. The proposed platform aims to achieve a perfect balance between architecture evaluation time (3.2% with respect to SPICE netlist) and accuracy in performance estimation (98% with respect to SPICE netlist). A comparative study between SPICE model, structural modeling, and the proposed modeling scheme (DPM) is reported here. As a case study, a 14-bit, 4.2MSPS SAR-ADC architecture is evaluated, designed, and verified.