A Fast and Cost-Effective Calibration Strategy of Inter-Stage Residual Amplification Errors for Cyclic-Pipelined ADCs

Due to nonideal residue amplification, the limited resolution of pipelined analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) has become a popular research topic for ADC designers. High-gain and high-speed amplifiers usually consume too much power for a decent ADC. Hence, this paper proposes a fast and cost-effective foreground calibration strategy for cyclic-pipelined ADCs. The calibration strategy compensates for the gain error due to inter-stage residual amplification, which alleviates the DC gain requirement for internal amplifiers. Unlike other digital calibrations, the proposed scheme is implemented with a cyclic-pipelined structure, and only one parameter needs to be calibrated, whose value can be feasibly calculated by the Fix-Point Iteration algorithm. The proposed calibration scheme is implemented in an area-efficient 16-bit, 2 MS/s cyclic-pipelined ADC, fabricated in 180 nm CMOS technology. The ADC is designed and realized by cycling a 6-bit sub-ADC four times with 1-bit redundancy each time. The calibration algorithm manages to recover the sampled data to 93.85 dB spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) even with a 57.8 dB-DC-gain amplifier. The total power consumption of ADC is 17.92 mW and it occupies an active area of 1.8 mm2.