A Pipelined Dynamic Reference A/D Converter

The dynamic reference ADC architecture has built-in digital-to-analog converters (DAC) implemented in the feedforward path to establish the reference voltages dynamically. High-speed conversion is achieved with the same number of comparators as the intended number of bit resolutions. In this work, a novel pipelined dynamic reference architecture is proposed, with built-in DACs realized using simple current steering circuits and R-2R networks. Several techniques such as offset compensation and pipelining are used to achieve the high-speed high-accuracy performance with a small chip area.