A survey on digital background calibration of ADCs

In this paper, a general description of digital ADC calibration approaches in current state-of-the-art is presented, with particular emphasis in Pipeline converters. The study performs a classification of the existing techniques considering two basic aspects: a) the principle of operation and the particular errors which can be compensated after calibration, b) the process from which a measurement of the errors, and therefore the calibrated output code, is obtained. Attention will be paid to those approaches applied in background mode and hence not requiring the interruption of the normal ADC operation.