Design of ultra low power flash ADC using TMCC & bit referenced encoder in 180nm technology

Analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are needed in all those applications, which interface with the analogue world and exploit the digital processing of data. As digital processing is more and more gaining ground over analogue signal processing, the importance of ADCs correspondingly increases. The Flash type ADC, also known as Direct Conversion ADC, uses a bank of comparators, operating in parallel to achieve a high data conversion rate. In this paper, an area efficient low power high Speed 3-bit Flash Type ADC using bit referenced encoder is proposed in 180 nm CMOS technology. The concept of Threshold Modified Comparator Circuit (TMCC) is also introduced as a modification of the conventional comparator. The proposed design of the ADC occupies an active area of 0.0036 mm² and consumes 43.146 μW of average power while operating with an input frequency (f_in) of 10 MHz and a supply voltage of 1.8 Volt.