A Low-Power Delta-Sigma Modulator Using a Charge-Pump Integrator

In this paper a low-power switched-capacitor integrator based on a capacitive charge-pump (CP) is presented, and its practical effects are discussed. The CP integrator is employed as the first stage of a ΔΣ ADC. The 0.13 μm CMOS prototype of the CP based ADC achieves the same performance as a conventional ADC while consuming 66% lower OTA power in the front-end integrator. The CP based modulator realizes 87.8 dB SNDR, 89.2 dB SNR and 90 dB DR over a 10 kHz bandwidth with 148 W power consumption. The conventional ADC has similar performance but dissipates 241 W. The energy required per conversion-step for the CP based ADC (0.369 pJ/step) is almost 40% lower than that of the conventional ADC (0.607 pJ/step).