A digital blind background capacitor mismatch calibration technique for pipelined ADC

A new digital background calibration technique to compensate for the capacitor mismatch in pipelined analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is presented. A digital signal from the ADC output is constructed so as to transform the capacitor mismatch to gain error. A simple modification to the conventional multiplying digital-to-analog converter (MDAC) allows the ADC to toggle between different configurations to create a reference signal used to calibrate blindly the ADC in the background. The creation of this signal does not produce any limitation for the ADC in terms of speed or degrading the input dynamic range. Simulation results show the effectiveness of this new method.