A 10 GS/s, 3-Bit ADC with Novel Decoder in SiGe BiCMOS Technology

This paper presents a design of 10-GS/s, 3-bit analog-to-digital converter in a 0.13 μm SiGe BiCMOS technology for optical communication application. This fully differential flash ADC includes a wide-bandwidth track-and-hold amplifier, a high-resolution comparator array and a novel differential decoder. By using our novel differential decoder, this ADC design achieves better than 2.8 effective bits for lower input frequencies and 2.5 effective bits for 1 GHz input frequency at a sampling rate of 10 GS/s. This ADC consumes 1.6 W with a 10 GS/s clock rate, while operating from -5/-3.3 V power supplies and its core area is only occupies 1×1.2 mm
²
.