A pipelined SAR ADC with gain-stage based on capacitive charge pump

Abstract

This paper presents a 14-bit, tunable bandwidth two-stage pipelined successive approximation analog to digital converter which is suitable for low-power, cost-effective sensor readout circuits. To overcome the high DC gain requirement of operational transconductance amplifier in the gain-stage, the multi-stage capacitive charge pump (CCP) was utilized to achieve the gain-stage instead of using the switch capacitor integrator. The detailed design considerations are given in this work. Thereafter, the 14-bit ADC was designed and fabricated in a low-cost 0.35-µm CMOS process. The prototype ADC achieves a peak SNDR of 75.6 dB at a sampling rate of 20 kS/s and 76.1 dB at 200 kS/s while consuming 7.68 and 96 µW, respectively. The corresponding FoM are 166.7 and 166.3 dB. Since the bandwidth of CCP is tunable, the ADC maintains a SNDR >75 dB upto 260 kHz. The core area occupied by the ADC is 0.589 mm2.