The Race for the Extra Decibel: A Brief Review of Current ADC Performance Trajectories

At the turn of this century, there was widespread concern that the performance of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) might have reached a saturation point and would, in fact, deteriorate as we began to scale into deep submicron CMOS technology. The past 15 years of innovation have clearly refuted such fears. Driven by a combination of application pull, architectural modifications, and relentless optimization, we have seen steady improvements in several key performance metrics. The purpose of this article is to enumerate some of the pertaining progress slopes, explain their possible foundations, and speculate about their remaining lifetime. In this context, it is important to note that this general subject has received a great deal of attention over the years, as evidenced by the large number of ADC surveys and trend papers (see, e.g., [1]-[20]). The advanced reader is referred to these contributions for a deep dive.