A frequency based digital background calibration technique for pipelined ADCs

This paper presents a new digital calibration scheme for pipelined ADCs. The proposed technique corrects the gain error of the converter. Analog and digital complexity required in the correction process resembles the correlation based method; however the new method converges many times faster. The high speed of convergence is due to the use of frequency characteristics, instead of correlation process, to separate injected signal from the input signal. The proposed technique was compared to one of the fastest correlation based methods (FGEC). Simulation results show that the speed of the proposed algorithm is the same as FGEC without the need for interpolation which is needed in FGEC method.