The reduction of sampling noise in switched-capacitor circuits through spatial oversampling

A fundamental limit to the switched-capacitor design of A/D converters has been thought to be the sampling or kT/C noise on the input capacitor. Such a limitation imposes a lower bound on capacitor sizes, and hence an upper bound on the maximum possible sampling rate. However, it is shown here that sampling noise need not be a fundamental limit, and that many times the performance of existing A/D converters is possible.