Foreground calibration technique of a pipeline ADC using capacitor ratio of Multiplying Digital-to-Analog Converter (MDAC)

A foreground calibration technique of a pipeline analog-to-digital converter (ADC) has been presented in this paper. This work puts an emphasis on erroneous ADC output occurring due to device mismatch, which, in any standard CMOS process boils down to capacitor mismatch. Deviation of gain of a multiplying digital-to-analog converter (MDAC), also known as the radix of a pipeline ADC stage, from its ideal values adds to the non-linearity of the ADC output. Capacitor mismatch is a major contributor for such an error. The proposed foreground calibration technique makes use of a simple arithmetic unit to extract the radix value from the ADC output for calibration. It uses a sinusoidal signal at the input for calibration purposes. The input sinusoidal signal can be sampled by the ADC clock at any rate for the calibration algorithm to be successful. Behavioral simulation of a pipeline ADC with 5% capacitor mismatch supports the established technique. To verify the calibration algorithm further, pipeline ADCs of different resolutions have been designed and simulated in a 0.18 μm CMOS process.