CMOS charge-transfer preamplifier for offset-fluctuationcancellation in low-power A/D converters

We have developed a low-power, high-accuracy comparator composed of a dynamic latch and a CMOS charge transfer preamplifier (CT preamplifier). The CT preamplifier amplifies the input signal with no static power dissipation, and the operation is almost insensitive to the device parameter fluctuations. The low-power and high-accuracy comparator has been realized by combining the CT preamplifier with a dynamic latch circuit. The fluctuation in the offset voltage of a dynamic latch is reduced by a factor of the preamplifier gain. A 4-bit flash A/D converter circuit has been designed and fabricated by 0.6-μm CMOS process. Low differential nonlinearity of less than ±4 mV has been verified by the measurements on test circuits, showing 8-bit resolution capability. Very low power operation at 4.3 μW per MS/s per comparator has also been achieved     

A high-speed CMOS comparator with 8-b resolution

A comparator consisting of a differential input stage, two regenerative flip-flops, and an S-R latch is presented. No offset cancellation is exploited, which reduces the power consumption as well as the die area and increases the comparison speed. An experimental version of the comparator has been integrated in a standard double-poly double-metal 1.5-μm n-well process with a die area of only 140×100 μm². This circuit, operating under a +2.5/-2.5-V power supply, performs comparison to a precision of 8 b with a symmetrical input dynamic range of 2.5 V (therefore ±0.5 LSB resolution is equal to ±4.9 mV)     

A high-speed and high-resolution CMOS comparator with three-stage preamplifier

The accuracy of A/D and D/A converters depend largely upon their inner comparators. To guarantee 12-bit high resolution for an A/D converter, a precise CMOS comparator consisting of a three-stage differential preamplifier together with a positive feedback latch is proposed. Circuit structure, gain, the principle of input offset voltage storage and latching time constant for the comparator will be analyzed and optimized in this article. With 0.5 μm HYNIX mixed signal technology, the simulation result shows that the circuit has a precision of 400 μV at 20 MHz. The test result shows that the circuit has a precision of 600 μV at 16 MHz, and dissipates only 78 μW of power dissipation at 5 V. The size of the chip is 210 × 180 μm2. The comparator has been successfully used in a 10 MSPS 12-bit A/D converter. The circuit can be also used in a less than 13-bit A/D converter.     

一种新型低电压极限电流检测电路

为磁滞电流控制的DC-DC开关稳压器设计了一种新型的极限电流检测器。该电路不借助于专门的电流检测电路,只使用一个检测MOSFET和一个电压比较器来实现极限电流检测,减小了电路的复杂度。针对电流检测器的要求,设计了一种低电源电压、高共模电压的比较器。使用TSMC 0.18μm CMOS混合信号工艺,对电路进行设计。结果表明,电路具有很好的容差特性,并且电路可工作在1.2 V的低电源电压下。     

一种单片高速八位A／D转换器的设计

本文介绍了一种硅双极型单片大规模集成8位逐次近似A/D转换器X1001的电路设计,这种电路采用了自锁式电压比较器和高速低功耗ECL逻辑电路,转换时间为400ns,是单片集成逐次近似A/D转换器中速度最快的器件。     

A low-power low-offset dynamic comparator for analog to digital converters

A comparator comprises a cross coupled circuit which produces a positive feedback. In conventional comparators, the mismatch between the cross coupled circuits determines the trade-off between the speed, offset and the power consumption of the comparator. A new low-offset low-power dynamic comparator for analog-to-digital converters is introduced. The comparator benefits from two stages and two operational phases to reduce the offset voltage caused by the mismatch effect inside the positive feedback circuit. Rigorous statistical analysis yields the input referred offset voltage and the delay of the comparator based on the circuit random parameters. The derivations are verified with exhaustive Monte-Carlo simulations at various corner cases of the process. A comparison between typical comparator and the proposed comparator in 180 nm and 90 nm has been made. The power consumption of the proposed comparator is about 44% of the conventional and its offset voltage is at least one-third of other mentioned conventional comparators.     

A monolithic voltage-comparator array for A/D converters

Describes a monolithic circuit consisting of an array of 8 voltage comparators, a resistive voltage divider, and associated logic circuits. Intended as an encoding component for high-speed parallel A/D converters, this `3-bit quantizer' uses regeneration for voltage gain and signal storage. A Gray-code output minimizes the problem of comparator indecision. The principal error sources are an asymmetry-induced comparator offset with 2-mV standard deviation and a thermally induced offset of a much as /spl plusmn/2.5 mV, dependent on signal history. The quantizer has been incorporated in an experimental 6-bit 200 megasample/s (MS/s) A/D converter.     

Low power time-domain rail-to-rail comparator with a new delay element for ADC applications

In this paper, a rail-to-rail time-domain comparator with low power supply voltage and low power consumption is introduced. The comparator can be employed in low-power converters and biomedical applications. In the proposed time-domain comparator, a rail-to-rail delay element has been employed to generate a significant voltage-to-time gain for the full range of input signals. This circuit is designed, laid out, and simulated in 0.18 μm TSMC technology and powered by 0.6 V and 1 V supply voltages. The simulation results show that the proposed comparator has a rail-to-rail dynamic range and the power consumption of the circuit is 0.6 μW and 19 μW at the clock frequency of 10 MHz and 100 MHz, respectively. The active area of 56 μm × 14 μm shows the compactness of the circuit comparing to the other similar works. The proposed comparator was used in an ADC to show its effectiveness to improve the performance of the ADC. An 8-bit 0.8 V 100 kS/s SAR-ADC is designed and simulated. It consumes 430 nW and the figure of merit is 19.3fJ/conversion-step.     

A precision variable-supply CMOS comparator

Several new techniques are presented for the design of precision CMOS voltage comparator circuits which operate over a wide range of supply voltages. Since most monolithic A/D converter systems contain an on-chip voltage reference, techniques have been developed to replicate the reference voltage in order to provide stable supply-independent DC bias voltages, and controlled internal voltage swings for the comparator. These techniques are necessary in order to eliminate harmful bootstrapping effects which can potentially occur in all AC coupled MOS analog circuits. An actively controlled biasing scheme has been developed to allow for differentially autozeroing the comparator for applications in differential A/D converter systems. A general approach for selecting the gain in AC-coupled gain stages is also presented. The comparator circuit has been implemented in a standard metal-gate CMOS process. The measured comparator resolution is less than 1 mV, and the allowable supply voltages range from 3.5 to 10 V.     

铁氧体驱动与双路功率MOS单片集成电路研究

介绍了一种集成低压铁氧体驱动器和功率MOS管的单片集成电路。其内建驱动器工作电压9 V,功率MOS管极限电压大于80 V,工作电流3 A。该电路内含D/A转换器、双路比较器、触发器和组合逻辑电路,以及过频过压保护等功能,采用键合SOI深槽的CMOS/LDMOS工艺制作。     

基于InP-DHBT的20 GHz的超高速比较器

采用截止频率fT为170 GHz的InP-DHBT工艺,我们设计并制作了一个超高速主从电压比较器。整个芯片的面积（包括焊盘）是0.75?1.04 mm2,在-4V的单电源电压下消耗的功耗是440mW（不包括时钟产生部分）。整个芯片包含了77个InP DHBTs。比较器的尼奎斯特测试到了20GHz,输入灵敏度在10 GHz采样率的时候是6mV,在20 GHz的时候是16 mV。据我们所知,这在国内还是第一次在单片上集成超过70个InP DHBTs的电路,也是目前国内具有最高采样率的比较器。     

Design of high speed and low power 4-bit comparator using FGMOS

This paper presents a novel low power and high speed 4-bit comparator extendable to 64-bits using floating-gate MOSFET (FGMOS). Here, we have exploited the unique feature of FGMOS wherein the effective voltage at its floating-gate is the weighted sum of many input voltages which are capacitively coupled to the floating-gate. The performance of proposed 4-bit comparator circuit has been compared with other comparator circuits designed using CMOS, transmission gate (TG), pass transistor logic (PTL) and gate diffusion input (GDI) technique. The proposed FGMOS based 4-bit comparator have shown remarkable performance in terms of transistor count, speed, power dissipation and power delay product besides full swing at the output in comparison to the existing comparator designs available in literature. Thus the proposed circuit can be viable option for high speed and low power applications. The performance of the proposed FGMOS based 4-bit comparator has been verified through OrCAD PSpice simulations through circuit file/schematics using level 7 parameters obtained from TSMC in 0.13 μm technology with the supply voltage of 1 V.     

A monolithic charge-balancing successive approximation A/D technique

A new multiple-differential-voltage input, MOS, sampled-data, `charge-balance' comparator which can `weight' or scale each of many input voltage pairs has been developed. This comparator easily allows a differential analog input voltage capability on a monolithic A/D converter and greatly reduces the required number of resistors and decoding switches of a potentiometric successive approximation register (SAR) A/D design. An 8 bit converter has been built which uses 20 Rs and 32 switches as compared to the 256 Rs and 512 switches of a standard 2/SUP N/R ladder design. Measurements made on the 8 bit A/D converter are reported and indicate that at least 12 bit converters are possible with this technique. Therefore, a 13 bit converter has been designed which exhibits even greater component reductions-33 Rs and 64 switches instead of 8192 Rs and 16384 switches. A simple interface to microprocessors is provided for both converters which makes use of the standard logic signals of the control bus where the A/D is designed to appear as memory or an I/O port to the microprocessor. A new flexible reference voltage circuit is presented which, in combination with the analog differential input voltage feature, can accommodate arbitrary analog input voltage spans with any desired zero scale offset.     

A multistep A/D converter family with efficient architecture

A family of 8- and 10-b analog/digital converters (ADCs) has been designed using a more efficient architecture. The 10-b ADC requires two 4-b (two 3-b for the 8-b converter) half-flash cycles and a self-corrected voltage estimator. While the speed is similar to that of conventional half-flash ADCs, power consumption and die size are lower due to reduced numbers of comparators and resistors. The flash steps can be reduced by 1 b each, for an overall reduction in comparator count by a factor of 2. This architecture can be used to reduce the comparator and resistor count of any existing half-flash ADCs, ultimately decreasing die area and power consumption. For the same process and resolution, this architecture reduces die size and power consumption by 50%     

A 150-mW, 8-bit video-frequency A/D converter

The authors describe an 8-bit, extremely low-power, flash A/D converter LSI for video-frequency image signal processing. This converter uses a shallow-groove-isolated bipolar VLSI technology. It consumes only 150 mW, which is half the amount of the lowest power consumption so far reported. This low level of power consumption is achieved by the use of a comparator circuit, which is newly designed. This converter can digitize video signals of up to 10 MHz at a conversion rate of 30 MHz. A differential gain (DG) error of 1% and a differential phase (DP) error of less than 0.5/spl deg/ were observed.     

A fully parallel 10-bit A/D converter with video speed

Describes a 20 MHz conversion speed, fully parallel, analog-to-digital converter device which has been designed for use at video speed. Laser trimming technology has been adopted to improve nonlinearity errors brought about by reference voltage distortion to less than 1 mV to realize a /SUP 1///SUB 2/ LSB accuracy for the 10-bit A/D converter. The large number of comparator stages required by a parallel converter leads to a high number of components and large power dissipation. Therefore, a circuit with a reduced number of components and optimized power has been used. The process employed is a 3 /spl mu/m bipolar process, which integrates about 40000 elements onto a 9.2/spl times/9.8 mm chip.     

10 Gbit/s low-power bit synchroniser with automatic retiming phase alignment

A 10 Gbit/s bit-synchroniser circuit has been fabricated using an enhancement/depletion 0.3 mu m recessed-gate AlGaAs/GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well FET process. The differential gain of the exclusive-or phase comparator circuit is measured to be 371 mV/rad. The phase margins for monotonous phase comparison are -54/+21 degrees relative to the 'in bit cell centre' position of the negative going clock edge. The chip has a power dissipation of 160 mW when using a supply voltage of 1.90 V.<>     

A monolithic video A/D converter

The design and measured performance of a fully parallel monolithic 8-bit A/D converter is reported. The required comparators and combining logic were designed and fabricated with a standard high-performance triple-diffused technology. A bipolar comparator circuit giving good performance with high input impedance is described. Circuit operation is reported at sample rates up to 30 megasamples per second (MS/s), with analog input signal power at frequencies up to 6 MHz. Full 8-bit linearity was achieved. An SNR of 42-44 dB was observed at input signal frequencies up to 5.3 MHz.     

A 5-GHz SiGe HBT return-to-zero comparator for RF A/D conversion

This paper presents a monolithic comparator implemented in a 0.5-μm SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) process. The SiGe HBT process provides HBT npn transistors with maximum f_T over 40 GHz and f_max over 55 GHz. The comparator circuit employs a resettable slave stage, which was designed to produce return-to-zero output data. Operation with sampling rates up to 5 GHz has been demonstrated by both simulation and experiments. The comparator chip attains an input range of 1.5 V, dissipates 89 mW from a 3-V supply, and occupies a die area of 407×143 μm². The comparator is intended for analog-to-digital (A/D) conversion of 900 MHz RF signals     

An HTS quasi-one junction SQUID-based periodic threshold comparatorfor a 4-bit superconductive flash A/D converter

An all high-T_c periodic threshold comparator for application in a 4-bit superconductive A/D converter has been realized and tested. The theoretical threshold curve of the comparator is calculated and compared to the measured results. Furthermore, the thermal noise immunity and the influence of flux-flow are considered, resulting in practical design constraints for the comparator circuit