This paper reviews and discusses a brief history of Nyquist ADCs. Bipolar flash ADCs for early development stage of HDTV and digital oscilloscopes, a Bi-CMOS two-step flash ADC using resistive interpolation for home HDTV receivers, a CMOS two-step flash ADC using capacitive interpolation for handy camcorders, pipelined ADCs using CMOS operational amplifiers, CMOS flash ADCs using dynamic comparator and digital offset compensation, SAR ADCs using low noise dynamic comparators and MOM capacitors, and hybrid ADCs are reviewed.

High-speed flash ADCs are useful in high-speed applications such as communication receivers. Due to offset voltage variation in the sub-micron processes, the power consumption and the area increase significantly to suppress variation. As an alternative to suppressing the variation, we have developed a flash ADC architecture that selects the comparators based on offset voltage ranking for reference generation. Specifically, with the order statistics as a basis, our method selects the minimum number of comparators to obtain equally spaced reference values. Because the proposed ADC utilizes offset voltages as references, no resistor ladder is required. We also developed a time-domain sorting mechanism for the offset voltages to achieve on-chip comparator selection. We first perform a detailed analysis of the order statistics based selection method and then design a 4-bit ADC in a commercial 65-nm process and perform transistor-level simulation. When using 127 comparators, INLs of 20 virtual chips are in the range of -0.34LSB/+0.29LSB to -0.83LSB/+0.74LSB, and DNLs are in the range of -0.33LSB/+0.24LSB to -0.77LSB/+1.18LSB at 1-GS/s operation. Our ADC achieves the SNDR of 20.9dB at Nyquist-frequency input and the power consumption of 0.84mW.

A low voltage stochastic flash ADC (analog-to-digital converter) is presented, with an inverter-based comparative unit which is used to replace comparator for comparison. Aiming at the low voltage and low power consumption, a key of our design is in the simplicity of the structure. The inverter-based comparative unit replacing a comparator enables us to decrease the number of transistors for area saving and power reduction. We insert the inverter-chain in front of the comparative unit for the signal stability and discuss an appropriate circuit structure for the resolution by analyzing three different ones. Finally, we design the whole stochastic flash ADC for verifying our idea, where the supply voltage can go down to 0.6V on the 65nm CMOS process, and through post-layout simulation result, we can observe its advantage visually in voltage, area and power consumption.

Progress of roles and schemes of calibration techniques in data converters are reviewed. Correction techniques of matching error and nonlinearity in analog circuits have been developed by digital assist using high-density and low-power digital circuits. The roles of the calibration are not only to improve accuracy but also to reduce power dissipation and chip area. Among various calibration schemes, the background calibration has significant advantages to achieve robustness to fast ambient change. Firstly the nonlinearity calibrations for pipeline ADCs are reviewed. They have required new solutions for redundancy of the circuits, an error estimation algorithm and reference signals. Currently utilizing the calibration techniques, the performance of 100 Msps and 12 bit has been achieved with 10 mW power dissipation. Secondly the background calibrations of matching error in flash ADC and DAC with error feedback to the analog circuits are described. The flash ADC utilizes the comparator offset correction with successive approximation algorithm. The DAC adopts a self current matching scheme with an analog memory. Measured dissipation power of the ADC is 0.38 mW at 300 MHz clock. Effects of the background calibration to suppress crosstalk noise are also discussed.

This paper presents a high speed single-stage latched comparator which is scheduled in time for both amplification and latch operations. Small active area and simple switching strategy besides desired power consumption at high comparison rates qualifies the proposed comparator to be repeatedly employed in high speed flash A/D converters. A strategy of kickback noise elimination besides gain enhancement is also introduced. A low power holding read-out circuit is presented. Post-Layout simulation results confirm 500 MS/s comparison rate with 5 mv resolution for a 1.6 v peak-to-peak input signal range and 600 µw power consumption from a 3.3 v power supply by using TSMC model of 0.35 µm CMOS technology. Total active area of proposed comparator and read-out circuit is about 300 µm2.

A novel low-power kick-back reduced comparator for use in high-speed flash analog-to-digital converters (ADC) is presented. The proposed comparator combines cascode transistors to reduce the kick-back noise with a built-in threshold voltage to remove the static power consumption of a reference. Without degrading other figures, the kick-back noise is reduced by a factor 8, compared to a previous design without cascode transistors. An improved calibration structure is also proposed to improve linearity when used in an ADC. Simulated in a standard CMOS technology the comparator consumes 106.5 µW at 1.8 V power supply and 1 GHz clock frequency.

In this paper, we describe a 6-bit 1.6-GS/s flash analog to digital converter (ADC). To reduce the power consumption and active area, we propose a new interpolation architecture using a symmetric three-input comparator. This ADC achieves 5.56 effective bits for input frequencies up to 220 MHz at 1.6 GS/s, and almost five effective bits for 660 MHz input at 1.6 GS/s. Peak INL and DNL are less than 0.5 LSB and 0.45 LSB, respectively. This ADC consumes 85 mW from 1.8 V at 1.6 GS/s and occupies an active area of 0.27 mm2. It is fabricated in 0.18-µm CMOS.

An 8.8-GS/s 6-bit CMOS analog-to-digital converter (ADC) chip was implemented by time-interleaving eight 1.1-GS/s 6-bit flash ADCs with a 0.18-µm CMOS process. Eight uniformly-spaced 1.1 GHz clocks with 50% duty cycle for the eight flash ADCs were generated by a clock generator, which consists of a phase-locked-loop, digital phase adjusters and digital duty cycle correctors. The input bandwidth of ADC with the ENOB larger than 5.0 bits was measured to be 1.2 GHz. The chip area and power consumption were 2.24 mm2 and 1.6 W, respectively.