26.5 A 5.5mW 6b 5GS/S 4×-lnterleaved 3b/cycle SAR ADC in 65nm CMOS

Communication devices such as 60GHz-band receivers and serial links demand power-efficient low-resolution gigahertz-sampling-rate ADCs. However, the energy efficiency of ADCs is degraded by scaling up transistor widths in the building blocks for high speed, thus increasing the impact of intrinsic parasitics. Parallel schemes like multi-bit processing and interleaving [1], can ease the problems caused by scaling and lead to better efficiency if the hardware overhead is wisely reduced [2]. This paper presents a combination of 4× time interleaving and 3b/cycle multi-bit SAR ADC in 65nm CMOS, achieving a Nyquist FoM of 39fJ/conv-step for 5GS/s at 1V supply.