Design of VCO-based ADCs

Design of VCO-based ADCs
Author: Vishnu Unnikrishnan
Publisher: Linköping University Electronic Press
Total Pages: 52
Release: 2017-03-28
Genre:
ISBN: 9176856240

Today's complex electronic systems with billions of transistors on a single die are enabled by the aggressive scaling down of the device feature size at an exponential rate as predicted by the Moore's law. Digital circuits benefit from technology scaling to become faster, more energy efficient as well as more area efficient as the feature size is scaled down. Moreover, digital design also benefits from mature CAD tools that simplify the design and cross-technology porting of complex systems, leveraging on a cell-based design methodology. On the other hand, the design of analog circuits is getting increasingly difficult as the feature size scales down into the deep nanometer regime due to a variety of reasons like shrinking voltage headroom, reducing intrinsic gain of the devices, increasing noise coupling between circuit nodes due to shorter distances etc. Furthermore, analog circuits are still largely designed with a full custom design ow that makes their design and porting tedious, slow, and expensive. In this context, it is attractive to consider realizing analog/mixed-signal circuits using standard digital components. This leads to scaling-friendly mixed-signal blocks that can be designed and ported using the existing CAD framework available for digital design. The concept is already being applied to mixed-signal components like frequency synthesizers where all-digital architectures are synthesized using standard cells as basic components. This can be extended to other mixed-signal blocks like digital-to-analog and analog to- digital converters as well, where the latter is of particular interest in this thesis. A voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO)-based analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is an attractive architecture to achieve all-digital analog-to digital conversion due to favorable properties like shaping of the quantization error, inherent anti-alias filtering etc. Here a VCO operates as a signal integrator as well as a quantizer. A converter employing a ring oscillator as the VCO lends itself to an all-digital implementation. In this dissertation, we explore the design of VCO-based ADCs synthesized using digital standard cells with the long-term goal of achieving high performance data converters built from low accuracy switch components. In a first step, an ADC is designed using vendor supplied standard cells and fabricated in a 65 nm CMOS process. The converter delivers an 8-bit ENOB over a 25 MHz bandwidth while consuming 3.3 mW of power resulting in an energy efficiency of 235 fJ/step (Walden FoM). Then we utilize standard digital CAD tools to synthesize converter designs that are fully described using a hardware description language. A polynomial-based digital post-processing scheme is proposed to correct for the VCO nonlinearity. In addition, pulse modulation schemes like delta modulation and asynchronous sigma-delta modulation are used as a signal pre-coding scheme, in an attempt to reduce the impact of VCO nonlinearity on converter performance. In order to investigate the scaling benefits of all-digital data conversion, a VCO-based converter is designed in a 28 nm CMOS process. The design delivers a 13.4-bit ENOB over a 5 MHz bandwidth achieving an energy efficiency of 4.3 fJ/step according to post-synthesis schematic simulation, indicating that such converters have the potential of achieving good performance in deeply scaled processes by exploiting scaling benefits. Furthermore, large conversion errors caused by non-ideal sampling of the oscillator phase are studied. An encoding scheme employing ones counters is proposed to code the sampled ring oscillator output into a number, which is resilient to a class of sampling induced errors modeled by temporal reordering of the transitions in the ring. The proposed encoding reduces the largest error caused by random reordering of up to six subsequent bits in the sampled signal from 31 to 2 LSBs. Finally, the impact of process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) variations on the performance while operating the converter from a subthreshold supply is investigated. PVT-adaptive solutions are suggested as a means to achieve energy-efficient operation over a wide range of PVT conditions.

CMOS

CMOS
Author: R. Jacob Baker
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 1074
Release: 2008
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0470229411

This edition provides an important contemporary view of a wide range of analog/digital circuit blocks, the BSIM model, data converter architectures, and more. The authors develop design techniques for both long- and short-channel CMOS technologies and then compare the two.

Applications of Power Electronics

Applications of Power Electronics
Author: Frede Blaabjerg
Publisher: MDPI
Total Pages: 476
Release: 2019-06-24
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 3038979740

Power electronics technology is still an emerging technology, and it has found its way into many applications, from renewable energy generation (i.e., wind power and solar power) to electrical vehicles (EVs), biomedical devices, and small appliances, such as laptop chargers. In the near future, electrical energy will be provided and handled by power electronics and consumed through power electronics; this not only will intensify the role of power electronics technology in power conversion processes, but also implies that power systems are undergoing a paradigm shift, from centralized distribution to distributed generation. Today, more than 1000 GW of renewable energy generation sources (photovoltaic (PV) and wind) have been installed, all of which are handled by power electronics technology. The main aim of this book is to highlight and address recent breakthroughs in the range of emerging applications in power electronics and in harmonic and electromagnetic interference (EMI) issues at device and system levels as discussed in ‎robust and reliable power electronics technologies, including fault prognosis and diagnosis technique stability of grid-connected converters and ‎smart control of power electronics in devices, microgrids, and at system levels.

Data Conversion Handbook

Data Conversion Handbook
Author: Walt Kester
Publisher: Newnes
Total Pages: 977
Release: 2005
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0750678410

This comprehensive new handbook is a one-stop engineering reference covering data converter fundamentals, techniques, and applications. Beginning with the basic theoretical elements necessary for a complete understanding of data converters, the book covers all the latest advances made in this changing field. Details are provided on the design of high-speec ADCs, high accuracy DACs and ADCs, sample-and-hold amplifiers, voltage sources and current reference,noise-shaping coding, sigma-delta converters, and much more.

Direct Digital Synthesizers

Direct Digital Synthesizers
Author: Jouko Vankka
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2013-04-17
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 147573395X

A major advantage of a direct digital synthesizer is that its output frequency, phase and amplitude can be precisely and rapidly manipulated under digital processor control. This book was written to find possible applications for radio communication systems.

Smart Sensor Interfaces

Smart Sensor Interfaces
Author: Johan Huijsing
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1461560616

Smart Sensor Interfaces brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast moving area. Smart Sensor Interfaces serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.

Advanced Interfacing Techniques for Sensors

Advanced Interfacing Techniques for Sensors
Author: Boby George
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2017-04-03
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 3319553690

This book presents ways of interfacing sensors to the digital world, and discusses the marriage between sensor systems and the IoT: the opportunities and challenges. As sensor output is often affected by noise and interference, the book presents effective schemes for recovering the data from a signal that is buried in noise. It also explores interesting applications in the area of health care, un-obstructive monitoring and the electronic nose and tongue. It is a valuable resource for engineers and scientists in the area of sensors and interfacing wanting to update their knowledge of the latest developments in the field and learn more about sensing applications and challenges.

Understanding Smart Sensors

Understanding Smart Sensors
Author: Randy Frank
Publisher: Artech House Publishers
Total Pages: 296
Release: 1996
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN:

"Two of the most important trends in sensor development in recent years have been advances in micromachined sensing elements of all kinds, and the increase in intelligence applied at the sensor level. This book addresses both, and provides a good overview of current technology". -- I&CS

Analog Circuit Design

Analog Circuit Design
Author: Johan Huijsing
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 466
Release: 1992-12-31
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9780792392880

This volume of Analog Circuit Design concentrates on three topics: Operational Amplifiers. A-to-D converters and Analog CAD. The book comprises six papers on each topic written by internationally recognised experts. These papers have a tutorial nature aimed at improving the design of analog circuits. The book is divided into three parts. Part I, Operational Amplifiers, presents new technologies for the design of Op-Amps in both bipolar and CMOS technologies. Two papers demonstrate techniques for improving frequency and gain behavior at high voltage. Low voltage bipolar Op-Amp design is treated in another paper. The realization high-speed and high gain VLSI building blocks in CMOS is demonstrated in two papers. The final paper shows how to provide output power with CMOS buffer amplifiers. Part II, Analog-to-Digital Conversion, presents papers which address very high conversion speeds and very high resolution implementations using sigma-delta modulation architectures. Analog to Digital converters provide the link between the analog world of transducers and the digital world of signal processing and computing. High-performance bipolar and MOS technologies result in high-resolution or high-speed convertors which can be applied in digital audio or video systems. Furthermore, the advanced high-speed bipolar technologies show an increase in conversion speed into the gigahertz range. Part III, Analog Computer Aided Design, presents the latest research towards providing analog circuit designers with the tools needed to automate much of the design process. The techniques and methodologies described demonstrate the advances being made in developing analog design tools comparable with those already available for digital design. The papers in this volume are based on those presented at the Workshop on Advances in Analog Circuit Design held in Delft, The Netherlands in 1992. The main intention of the workshop was to brainstorm with a group of about 100 analog design experts on the new possibilities and future developments on the above topics. The result of this brainstorming is contained in Analog Circuit Design, which is thus an important reference for researchers and design engineers working in the forefront of analog circuit design and research.