An adaptive, truly background calibration method for high speed pipeline ADC design

This paper presents a self-calibration method for designing high speed pipeline ADC. Unlike all existing calibration algorithms, the proposed calibration does not insert any test signal or dithering signals to the pipeline signal path and it does not take any measurements at any internal nodes. It simply observes the ADC output digital codes during the normal operation of the ADC and extracts needed information about the ADC to generate the correction codes. This process is done adaptively and the correction codes are improved gradually as the ADC is being used for a longer time. Simulation results show that a 14-bit ADC with 7 bit original performance was gradually improved to close to 14 bit performance.