A digital background nonlinearity calibration algorithm for pipelined ADCs

This paper presents a new digital background calibration algorithm for pipelined analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). Background calibration can extract calibration data without interrupting ADCs normal conversion operation. Digital calibration can relax the design difficulty of analog circuits of ADCs, and gains the improvement of technology scaled down. This algorithm provides a method to effectively estimate the nonlinearity of op amp, and calibrates it in digital domain without any additional analog circuit. Simulation results show that the ENOB can be improved from 6.3b to 10.67b by the proposed algorithm.