A differential voltage reference generator for pipelined ADCs

A differential voltage reference generator for pipelined analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is presented in this paper. A modified Brokaw bandgap reference (BGR) is adopted to generate an adjustable sub-1V reference voltage. A new single-ended to differential converter based on current conversion is proposed to obtain the required differential voltage reference from the output of BGR directly. Fabricated in TSMC 0.18μm CMOS technology, the proposed circuit generates a 0.5-V differential reference voltage with a temperature coefficient of less than 46 ppm/°C. The power consumption is 3.5 mW under a 1.8-V power supply.