A 1 mW 71.5 dB SNDR 50 MS/s 13 bit Fully Differential Ring Amplifier Based SAR-Assisted Pipeline ADC

This paper presents a 13 bit 50 MS/s fully differential ring amplifier based SAR-assisted pipeline ADC, implemented in 65 nm CMOS. We introduce a new fully differential ring amplifier, which solves the problems of single-ended ring amplifiers while maintaining the benefits of high gain, fast slew based charging and an almost rail-to-rail output swing. We implement a switched-capacitor (SC) inter-stage residue amplifier that uses this new fully differential ring amplifier to give accurate amplification without calibration. In addition, a new floated detect-and-skip (FDAS) capacitive DAC (CDAC) switching method reduces the switching energy and improves linearity of first-stage CDAC. With these techniques, the prototype ADC achieves measured SNDR, SNR, and SFDR of 70.9 dB (11.5b), 71.3 dB and 84.6 dB, respectively, with a Nyquist frequency input. The prototype achieves 13 bit linearity without calibration and consumes 1 mW. This measured performance is equivalent to Walden and Schreier FoMs of 6.9 fJ/conversion.step and 174.9 dB, respectively.