A 5 GS/s 29 mW Interleaved SAR ADC with 48.5 dB SNDR Using Digital-Mixing Background Timing-Skew Calibration for Direct Sampling Applications

This article presents a 16-channel 5 GS/s time-interleaved (TI) SAR ADC for a direct-sampling receiver that employs a digital-mixing background timing mismatch calibration to compensate for timing-skew errors. It uses a first-order approximation to obtain the derivative of the autocorrelation of the input signal, subsequently used to evaluate the explicit amount of the timing-skew. Therefore, this allows a digital background calibration of the timing-skew, avoiding extra analog circuits. The proposed 16-channel TI ADC uses a splitting-combined monotonic DAC switching method for the individual SAR channel to achieve a trade-off of simple switching and small common-mode voltage variation of the comparator. The prototype, implemented in 28 nm CMOS, reaches a 48.5/47.8 dB SNDR with an input signal of 2.38/4.0 GHz after the proposed background timing mismatch calibration, respectively. Furthermore, the ADC core's power consumption is 29 mW sampling at 5 GS/s, with a Walden FoM of 26.7 fJ/conv.-step and a Schreier FoM of 157.9 dB.