A CMOS 6-Bit 16-GS/s Time-Interleaved ADC Using Digital Background Calibration Techniques

An 8-channel 6-bit 16-GS/s time-interleaved analog- to-digital converter (TI ADC) was fabricated using a 65 nm CMOS technology. Each analog-to-digital channel is a 6-bit flash ADC. Its comparators are latches without the preamplifiers. The input-referred offsets of the latches are reduced by digital offset calibration. The TI ADC includes a multi-phase clock generator that uses a delay-locked loop to generate 8 sampling clocks from a reference clock of the same frequency. The uniformity of the sampling intervals is ensured by digital timing-skew calibration. Both the offset calibration and the timing-skew calibration run continuously in the background. At 16 GS/s sampling rate, this ADC chip achieves a signal-to-distortion-plus-noise ratio (SNDR) of 30.8 dB. The chip consumes 435 mW from a 1.5 V supply. The ADC active area is 0.93 × 1.58 mm².