An ultra-low-power 10-Bit 100-kS/s successive-approximation analog-to-digital converter

Successive-approximation analog-to-digital converters (SA-ADCs) have recently been widely used for moderate-speed moderate-resolution applications where power consumption is of major concern. In this paper, several techniques are proposed to further reduce the power consumption of an SA-ADC. These solutions include a splitsegmented architecture for the capacitor-based digital-to-analog converter (DAC), a modified switching scheme for the DAC, and employing a smaller supply voltage for the comparator and the successive-approximation register while using a new power efficient digital level converter. Spectre simulation results of a single-ended 10-bit 100kS/s SA-ADC in a 0.13-mum CMOS technology employing the proposed techniques show that the ADC (excluding reference buffers) consumes less than 1 muW of power while offering an effective number of bits of 9.2.