Trends in high speed ADC design

This paper discusses trends in the design of high speed ADCs. Technology scaling has enabled an increased conversion rate; however, it now also leads to difficulties with increased resolution, with the SNR, and with decreased power consumption, especially for higher resolutions. New converter design challenges are needed. One strong trend in the design of ADCs is to omit operational amplifiers (OpAmps), which used to form the basis of modern ADCs but are now no longer useful. Comparator based ADCs, such as successive approximation ADCs, sub-ranging ADCs, or pipelined ADCs which all are used comparator-based design instead of conventional OpAmp-based design, become attractive as future high speed ADC architectures.