LDO-Free Power Management System: A 10-bit Pipelined ADC Directly Powered by Inductor-Based Boost Converter With Ripple Calibration

This article presents a compact power management solution for a pipeline analog-to-digital converter (ADC), employing only a switching-mode power converter. By directly powering the ADC using a boost DC-DC converter, the power delivery network (PDN) exhibits an overall-high power efficiency. The proposed foreground ADC calibration calibrates the ripple error induced from the power converter, which obviates the need for well-regulated supply and reference voltage offered by low-efficiency linear low-dropout regulators (LDOs). A chip integrates the boost DC-DC converter and the pipelined ADC with an external power inductor. The prototype, implemented in 65-nm CMOS, occupies 2.34-mm
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of total active area (9.4% - ADC, 2.6% - power controller and switches, and 88% - output capacitance). In the measurement, the boost converter, switching at 31.25MHz, converts a 0.5V input to 1.2V and delivers 22.8mW of power to the pipeline ADC. The boost DC-DC converter supplies all voltage domains, including analog/digital power supply and reference. The resulting overall system power efficiency is 78.6%. Sampled at 500MS/s, the ADC achieves a signal-to-noise and distortion ratio (SNDR) of 34.7/39.9dB without/with the ripple calibration for an input frequency of 177MHz, respectively.