PN-assisted digital background calibration of two-step ADC to over 14-bit accuracy

A new non-binary multiplying digital-to-analog converter (MDAC) structure with signal-dependent dithering scaling technique is proposed in this paper. A full digital background calibration algorithm based on pseudo-random dithers injection is used to calibrate the nonlinear errors of MDAC. By measuring sampling capacitor mismatch and op-amp gain errors of the pipelined analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in background, the errors will be greatly reduced by the proposed calibration algorithm. At the same time, the signal-dependent dithering scaling technique provides a swing margin to the injected pseudo-random signal. By using this technique, the errors caused by the capacitor mismatch and op-amp gain errors can be calibrated at the same time. What’s more, this method greatly accelerates the convergence speed. A two-stage 14-bit pipelined ADC is used to simulate and verify the proposed algorithm. The simulation results indicate the effectiveness of the technique, in which the signal-to-noise plus distortion (SNDR) and the spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) performance of a 14-bit two-step ADC are improved from 49.12 and 56.25 to 85.68 and 102.23 dB with the input frequency being 0.06 * f _s , respectively. The SFDR is more than 98 dB. The SNDR reaches 84 dB in the whole Nyquist bandwidth after calibration. Integral nonlinearity is improved from 80 to 1.5 least significant bits after calibration.