A 750mW 24GS/s 12b Time-Interleaved ADC for Direct RF Sampling in Modern Wireless Systems

An ADC with a sampling rate of tens of GS/s and a high input bandwidth can greatly ease the design of wireless network systems. Such ADCs help in simplifying the analog front end design by relaxing the requirements for anti-alias and anti-image filtering. Having a bandwidth of up to 7.2GHz facilitates direct sampling on the 5G full FR1 band including LTE-U and WiFi 6/7 networks. However, the available state-of-the-art high-speed ADCs operating at 20GS/s or higher are designed mostly for wireline communications [5] and are not suitable for wireless base station applications where a high spectral dynamic range with an NSD of -147dBFS/Hz and an SFDR of 70dB are required to support 1024-QAM and higher modulations. The other high-resolution ADCs available in the range from 5-20GS/s [1–4] have higher power consumption, larger area and insufficient SFDR to be reliably used in the previously mentioned applications. The reported ADC achieves 24GS/s sampling rate with an input bandwidth of 7.2GHz as well as 76dB SFDR and -147.5dBFS/Hz NSD with high power efficiency and small area.