• Journal of Semiconductor Engineering
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.99-108
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• 2021

Successive Approximation Register (SAR) Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADC) seem to become the hottest ADC architecture during the past decade in implementing energy-efficient high performance ADCs. In this overview, we will review what kind of circuit techniques and architectural advances have contributed to place the SAR ADC architecture at its current position, beginning from a single SAR ADC and moving to various hybrid architectures. At the end of this overview, a recently reported compact and high-speed SAR-Flash ADC is introduced as one design example of SAR-based hybrid ADC architecture.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.7
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• pp.17-26
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• 2016

This work proposes a 12b 60MS/s 0.18um CMOS Flash-SAR ADC for various systems such as wireless communications and portable video processing systems. The proposed Flash-SAR ADC alleviates the weakness of a conventional SAR ADC that the operation speed proportionally increases with a resolution by deciding upper 4bits first with a high-speed flash ADC before deciding lower 9bits with a low-power SAR ADC. The proposed ADC removes a sampling-time mismatch by using the C-R DAC in the SAR ADC as the combined sampling network instead of a T/H circuit which restricts a high speed operation. An interpolation technique implemented in the flash ADC halves the required number of pre-amplifiers, while a switched-bias power reduction scheme minimizes the power consumption of the flash ADC during the SAR operation. The TSPC based D-flip flop in the SAR logic for high-speed operation reduces the propagation delay by 55% and the required number of transistors by half compared to the conventional static D-flip flop. The prototype ADC in a 0.18um CMOS demonstrates a measured DNL and INL within 1.33LSB and 1.90LSB, with a maximum SNDR and SFDR of 58.27dB and 69.29dB at 60MS/s, respectively. The ADC occupies an active die area of $0.54mm^2$ and consumes 5.4mW at a 1.8V supply.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.7
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• pp.27-38
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• 2016

This work proposes a 12b 30MS/s 0.18um CMOS SAR ADC based on low-power composite switching with an active die area of $0.16mm^2$. The proposed composite switching employs the conventional $V_{CM}$-based switching and monotonic switching sequences while minimizing the switching power consumption of a DAC and the dynamic offset to constrain a linearity of the SAR ADC. Two equally-divided capacitors topology and the reference scaling are employed to implement the $V_{CM}$-based switching effectively and match an input signal range with a reference voltage range in the proposed C-R hybrid DAC. The techniques also simplify the overall circuits and reduce the total number of unit capacitors up to 64 in the fully differential version of the prototype 12b ADC. Meanwhile, the SAR logic block of the proposed SAR ADC employs a simple latch-type register rather than a D flip-flop-based register not only to improve the speed and stability of the SAR operation but also to reduce the area and power consumption by driving reference switches in the DAC directly without any decoder. The measured DNL and INL of the prototype ADC in a 0.18um CMOS are within 0.85LSB and 2.53LSB, respectively. The ADC shows a maximum SNDR of a 59.33dB and a maximum SFDR of 69.83dB at 30MS/s. The ADC consumes 2.25mW at a 1.8V supply voltage.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2012.05a
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• pp.88-90
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• 2012

This paper describes a 10-bit 10-MS/s asynchronous successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with a rail-to-rail input range. The proposed SAR ADC consists of a capacitor digital-analog converter (DAC), a SAR logic and a comparator. To reduce the frequency of an external clock, the internal clock which is asynchronously generated by the SAR logic and the comparator is used. The time-domain comparator with a offset calibration technique is used to achieve a high resolution. To reduce the power consumption and area, a split capacitor-based differential DAC is used. The designed asynchronous SAR ADC is fabricated by using a 0.18 um CMOS process, and the active area is $420{\times}140{\mu}m^2$. It consumes the power of 0.818 mW with a 1.8 V supply and the FoM is 91.8 fJ/conversion-step.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.68 no.1
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• pp.90-97
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• 2019

The charge redistribution digital-to-analog converter(CR-DAC) is often used for successive approximation register analog-to-digital converter(SAR ADC) that requiring low power consumption and small circuit area. However, CR-DAC is required 2 to the power of N unit capacitors to generate reference voltage for successive approximation of the N-bit SAR ADC, and many unit capacitors occupy large circuit area and consume more power. In order to improve this problem, this paper proposes SAR ADC using series capacitor DAC. The series capacitor DAC is required 2(1+N) unit capacitors to generate reference voltage for successive approximation and charges only two capacitors of the reference generation block. Because of these structural characteristics, the SAR ADC using series capacitor DAC can reduce the power consumption and circuit area. Proposed SAR ADC was designed in CMOS 180nm process, and at 1.8V supply voltage and 500kS/s sampling rate, proposed 6-bit SAR ADC have signal-to-noise and distortion ratio(SNDR) of 36.49dB, effective number of bits(ENOB) of 5.77-bit, power consumption of 294uW.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.20 no.12
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• pp.2317-2325
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• 2016

This paper presents a 10 bit successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with a reference driver. The proposed SAR ADC consists of a capacitive digital-to-analog converter (CDAC), a comparator, a SAR logic, and a reference driver which improves the immunity to the power supply noise. The reference driver generates the reference voltages of 0.45 V and 1.35 V for the SAR ADC with an input voltage range of ${\pm}0.9V$. The SAR ADC is implemented using a $0.18-{\mu}m$ CMOS technology with a 1.8-V supply. The proposed SAR ADC including the reference driver almost maintains an input voltage range to be ${\pm}0.9V$ although the variation of supply voltage is +/- 200 mV. It consumes 5.32 mW at a sampling rate of 10 MS/s. The measured ENOB, DNL, and INL of the ADC are 9.11 bit, +0.60/-0.74 LSB, and +0.69/-0.65 LSB, respectively.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.454-464
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• 2023

This paper proposes a low-power 8-bit asynchronous SAR ADC with a sampling rate of 1 MS/s for sensor node applications. The ADC uses bootstrapped switches to improve linearity and applies a VCM-based CDAC switching technique to reduce the power consumption and area of the DAC. Conventional synchronous SAR ADCs that operate in synchronization with an external clock suffer from high power consumption due to the use of a clock faster than the sampling rate, which can be overcome by using an asynchronous SAR ADC structure that handles internal comparisons in an asynchronous manner. In addition, the SAR logic is designed using dynamic logic circuits to reduce the large digital power consumption that occurs in low resolution ADC designs. The proposed ADC was simulated in a 180-nm CMOS process, and at a 1.8 V supply voltage and a sampling rate of 1 MS/s, it consumed 46.06 𝜇W of power, achieved an SNDR of 49.76 dB and an ENOB of 7.9738 bits, and obtained a FoM of 183.2 fJ/conv-step. The simulated DNL and INL are +0.186/-0.157 LSB and +0.111/-0.169 LSB.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.23-32
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• 2011

A 40 fJ/c-s, 1 V, 10-bit SAR ADC is presented for energy constrained wearable body sensor network application. The proposed 10-bit dual sampling capacitive DAC topology reduces switching energy by 62% compared with 10-bit conventional SAR ADC. Also, it is more robust to capacitor mismatch than the conventional architecture due to its cancelling effect of each capacitive DAC. The proposed SAR ADC is fabricated in 0.18 ${\mu}m$ 1P6M CMOS technology and occupies 1.17 $mm^2$ including pads. It dissipates only 1.1 ${\mu}W$ with 1 V supply voltage while operating at 100 kS/s.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.1218-1221
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• 2018

This paper presents a low-power 0.6-V 10-bit 200-kS/s double rail-to-rail successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC). The proposed scheme allows input signal with 4 times power which is compared with conventional one by applying proposed rail-to-rail scheme, and that improves signal-to-noise ratio(SNR) of NTV SAR ADCs. The prototype was designed using 65-nm CMOS technology. At a 0.6-V supply and $2.4-V_{pp}$ (differential) and 200-kS/s, the ADC achieves an SNDR of 59.87 dB and consumes 364.5-nW. The ADC core occupies an active area of only $84{\times}100{\mu}m^2$.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.31-35
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• 2018

This paper describes a low-power, SNDR (signal-to-noise and distortion ration) enhanced SAR (successive approximation register) type 12b ADC (analog-to-digital converter) with noise shaping technique. For low power consumption and small chip size of the DAC (digital-to-analog converter), the top plate sampling technique and the dummy capacitor switching technique are used to implement 12b operation with a 10b capacitor array in DAC. Noise shaping technique is applied to improve the SNDR by reducing the errors from the mismatching of DAC capacitor arrays, the errors caused by attenuation capacitor and the errors from the comparator noise. The proposed SAR ADC is designed with a $0.18{\mu}m$ CMOS process. The simulation results show that the SNDR of the SAR ADC without the noise shaping technique is 71 dB and that of the SAR ADC with the noise shaping technique is 84 dB. We can achieve the 13 dB improvement in SNDR with this noise shaping technique. The power consumption is $73.8{\mu}W$ and the FoM (figure-of-merit) is 5.2fJ/conversion-step.