An overview of digital calibration techniques for pipelined ADCs

As device dimensions and supply voltage are shrinking, the design of high-speed and high-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is getting more and more challenging. Since the shrinking device sizes enable high-speed and low-power digital circuits, there has been a trend to use digital circuits to estimate and correct for the analog circuit nonidealities (i.e. calibrate) to realize high-performance ADCs. This summary paper enumerates some of the digital techniques that have been adopted in the past two decades to realize high-speed high-resolution pipelined ADCs, which are typically used in communication and imaging applications.