A 65nm Continuous-Time Sigma-Delta Modulator With Limited OTA DC Gain Compensation

This paper explores the effects of compensating the performance degradation in high-speed Continuous-Time Sigma-Delta modulators when the loop integrators are implemented through limited gain Operational Transconductance Amplifiers. Yet, the low DC-gain strongly affects both integrator magnitude and phase responses, with a reduction in the overall effective number of bits. This work models the degradation as due to a signal-dependent memory-less perturbation and theoretically studies its compensation by feeding an opposite signal back to the integrator input. The implementation and experimental results on a 65nm CMOS 2nd order prototype evaluate the performance increase with this technique, where no other compensation, nor any digital calibration, is included. Tested in different conditions, the compensated prototype improves more than 1.5 bit the ENoB with respect to the uncompensated counterpart. For a sampling frequency of 500 MHz the power consumption is 1.7mW, resulting in a 477.2fJ/conv-lev Walden and a 148.8dB Schreirer Figures of Merit.