A NAND gate based standard cell VCO for use in synthesizable ADCs

Synthesizable all-digital ADCs lead to reduced design cost and design time as well as to low cross-technology porting costs. VCO-based ADC is an attractive candidate for the synthesis of ADCs using standard cells. However, a VCO, which is controlled by an analog input signal, is difficult to implement using standard digital circuits. Supply controlled ring oscillators using static CMOS inverters are used in prior works. In this work, an alternative VCO built using NAND gates is proposed for use in synthesizable converters. The circuit is demonstrated by employing it in an ADC synthesized from an HDL description. Transistor level simulation of the resulting netlist using the Spectre simulator shows that a performance of 10 bit ENOB over a 10 MHz bandwidth can be achieved after digital correction, using the proposed VCO.