A 4 Gbps current-mode transmitter for 12-bit 250 MSPS ADC

A 4 Gbps transmitter for a 12-bit 250 MSPS pipelined ADCs is presented. A low power current mode (CM) output driver with reverse scaling technique is proposed. A high speed, low power combined serializer is implemented to convert 12 bit parallel data into a seria1 data stream. The whole transmitter is used in a 12-bit 250 MSPS pipelined ADC for the digital output buffer and fabricated in 180 nm 1. 8 V 1P5M CMOS technology. Test results show that the transmitter provides an eye height greater than 800 mV for data rates of both 2 Gbps and 4 Gbps, the 12-bit 250 MSPS ADC achieves the SNR of 69.92 dBFS and SFDR of 81.17 dB with 20.1 MHz input at full sampling speed. The ADC with the 4 Gbps transmitter consumes the power consumption of 395 mW, where the power consumption of transmitter is 75 mW. The ADC occupies an area of 2.5×3.2 mm², where the active area of the transmitter block is 0.5×1.2 mm².