Background capacitor mismatch calibration for pipelined ADC

A new digital background calibration technique to compensate the capacitor mismatch in pipelined analog-to-digital converters (ADC) is presented. A digital signal from the ADC output is constructed so as to transform the capacitor mismatch to global gain error. A simple modification to the conventional MDAC allows the ADC to toggle between different configurations to create a reference signal used to calibrate blindly the ADC. This method does not produce any limitation of the ADC in terms of speed or input dynamic range.