A digital background calibration technique for pipelined analog-to-digital converters

A new background calibration technique for pipelined analog-to-digital converters is proposed. By dividing the step sizes of the multiplying digital-to-analog converter (MDAC) in a pipeline stages and injecting a random signal into the MDAC, it is possible to calibrate a pipeline stage without interrupting the normal analog-to-digital operation. The calibration can eliminate the nonlinear effects due to the MDAC´s gain error, input offset voltage, and output errors in the digital-to-analog conversion.