Breaking Through the Speed-Power-Accuracy Tradeoff in ADCs Using a Memristive Neuromorphic Architecture

The analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is a principal component in every data acquisition system. Unfortunately, modern ADCs tradeoff speed, power, and accuracy. In this paper, novel neuroinspired approaches are used to design a smart ADC that could be trained in real time for general purpose applications and break through conventional ADC limitations. Motivated by artificial intelligent learning algorithms and neural network architectures, the proposed ADC integrates emerging memristor technology with CMOS. We design a trainable four-bit ADC with a memristive neural network that implements the online gradient descent algorithm. This supervised machine learning algorithm fits multiple application specifications such as full-scale voltage ranges and sampling frequencies. Theoretical analysis, as well as simulation results, demonstrate highly powerful collective properties, including reconfiguration, mismatch self-calibration, adaptation to dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, noise tolerance, and power consumption optimization. The proposed ADC achieves 8.25 fJ/conv FOM, 3.7 ENOB, 0.4 LSB INL, and 0.5 LSB DNL. These promising properties make it a leading contender for general purpose and emerging data driven applications.