A fully digital self-calibration method for high resolution, pipelined A/D converters

In highly accurate pipelined analog/digital converters, precise control of comparator trip-points, inter-stage amplifier gains and effective levels of reconstructing D/A converters is difficult. A new calibration approach allows errors on all these components, and compensates for them in the digital domain. A system identification technique using the converter itself, determines the required digital coefficients. The achievable accuracy is comparable to sigma-delta converters, at effective sampling rates almost two orders of magnitude higher