Study And Design Of Low-power Successive Approximation Analog-to-digital Converter

Successive approximation analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) have medium resolution and medium speed, small chip area and low power consumption can also be achieved in CMOS process. Moreover, it is convenient to make multi-channel conversion. Due to their mixed advantages in resolution, speed, power and cost, successive approximation ADCs are widely applied in industry controlling, medical instruments, auxiliary analog-to-digital interfaces of micro-processors and so on.A 2.5V, 12bit, 500kS/s low-power successive approximation ADC is designed in this thesis, which adopts single rail-to-rail input and has power-down mode.Study work can be categorized into 3 parts:①A segmented capacitive digital-to- analog converter (DAC) is designed with 2 separated 6-bit arrays which consist of 128 unit capacitors in all, resulting in smaller chip area and lower dynamic power. Moreover, thermometer coding is applied to the top 3 bits, ensuring the DAC's monotonicity. Common centroid geometry is introduced in the layout to improve matching property.②A multi-stage comparator is designed, which is composed of 3 pre-amplifiers and a latch. Each pre-amplifier is optimized according to its position, the design of them and the analog buffer has already taken kickback noise into consideration. An offset cancellation technique is applied too. Simulation results show that, the proposed comparator can distinguish 0.2mV input with 10mV offset at 10MHz, while its power is 600uW.③The control circuit is designed in several modules, which is described in verilog-HDL, synthesized, placed and routed automatically. This digital block coordinates analog circuits to finish the successive approximation, and switches the chip into power-down mode or work mode.After circuit design and simulation, the physical layout design, post-simulation and chip measurement are also finished. The proposed ADC is designed and fabricated in UMC 0.18um Mixed Mode CMOS process, occupying 1.4mm×1mm. Measurement results show that, its SNDR achieves 63.13dB at 500kS/s, thus ENOB is 10.5bit, and |DNL| is less than 2LSB, |INL| is less than 4LSB, with overall power only 1.2mW.