INL systematic reduced-test technique for Pipeline ADCs

This paper presents a procedure to implement a high efficient test of the Integral Non-linearity (INL) of Pipeline ADCs using an extremely reduced set of test input amplitude levels (one order of magnitude lower than the total number of codes in the ADC). For a given architecture, the method provides the way to determine these levels to robustly capture the nonlinearity information. The location of each test level within the input range has low sensitivity to the internal ADC noise, and therefore, they are a good basis to continuously monitor the impact of process, aging and environment conditions variations (PVT) on the non-linearity, as well as miscalibration and possible failures in both foreground and background applications. The proposed method has been validated by realistic behavioral models in several examples.