A 10-bit 50 MS/s Pipelined ADC With Capacitor-Sharing and Variable-gₘ Opamp

A pipelined analog-to-digital converter (ADC) architecture which is suitable for low power and small area is presented. The prototype ADC achieves 10-bit resolution with only two opamps by removing a front-end sample-and-hold amplifier (SHA) and sharing an opamp between two successive pipeline stages. The errors from the absence of SHA and opamp-sharing are greatly reduced by the proposed techniques and circuits. Further reduction of power and area is achieved by using a capacitor-sharing technique and variable-gₘopamp. The ADC is implemented in 0.18CMOS technology and occupies a die area of 0.86mm². The differential and integral nonlinearity of the ADC are less than 0.39 LSB and 0.81 LSB, respectively, at full sampling rate. The ADC achieves 56.2 dB signal-to-noise plus distortion ratio, 72.7 dB spurious free dynamic range,-66.2$~$dB total harmonic distortion, 9.03 effective number of bits for a Nyquist input at full sampling rate, and consumes 12 mW from a 1.8 V supply.