In the Pursuit of the Optimal Accuracy-Speed-Power Analog-to-Digital Converter Architecture: A mathematical framework

The everlasting challenge in the design of every analog-to-digital converter (ADC) lies in maximizing the accuracy · speed ÷ power product by pushing all metrics toward their desired directions. To this end, tremendous progress has been made in advancing ADC performance both circuit- and architecture-wise. These advances have been captured by means of comparing experimental data points in surveys, with [1] being the most noteworthy. However, such comparisons give an ill-defined view since the data points correspond to different architectures that were optimized under different constraints and implemented in different process nodes. This provides little insight on architectural limits and makes a direct comparison under similar assumptions nontrivial.