Current-mode pipelined adc with time-interleaved sampling and mixed

Abstract

To convert an analog current to a digital signal using a high-speed pipelined analog-to-digigal (A/D) converter, the A/D converter may comprise a current sample- and hold (S/H) circuit at the input and several identical pipelined stages, where each stage contains a current S/H circuit, a current interstage low-resolution A/D converter and current references. To improve the speed of pipelined current-mode A/D converters the capacitive load seen by the output of every stage will be reduced. By adjusting the reference currents the power consumption will also be reduced. It is possible to achieve about 100 Msamples/s conversion rate and to reduce the power consumption by several times compared with existing designs. To increase the operation speed and to provide means to reduce the power consumption the pipelined current-mode A/D converter may comprise an S/H circuit (7) as the input and N pipelined stages (8), each of which contains an internal low-resolution A/D converter (9), a D/A converter (10), an S/H circuit (11), a reference current source (12) and an adder/subtractor (13). The most distinguishing features of the invented architecture are: 1) the inputs to the internal A/D converter and the interstage S/H circuit are timeinterleaved; and 2) the reference current to the D/A converter in every stage can be different.