A Highly Digital VCO-Based ADC Architecture for Current Sensing Applications

This paper presents a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) based current to digital converter for sensor readout applications. Second order noise shaping of the quantization error is achieved by using implicit capacitance of the sensor to realize a passive integrator and a VCO-based quantizer. The non-linearity in voltage to frequency conversion of the VCO is tackled by placing the VCO in a loop consisting of a simple digital IIR filter and a passive integrator. The IIR filter provides large gain within the signal bandwidth and suppresses VCO input swing. As a result, non-linearity of the VCO is not exercised, thus greatly improving the proposed architecture´s immunity to VCO nonlinearity. The use of a digital filter instead of an analog loop filter eases the design and makes it scaling friendly. Designed for an ambient light sensor application, the proposed circuit achieves 900 pA accuracy over an input current range of 4 μA. Fabricated in a 0.18 μm CMOS process, the readout circuit consumes a total of 77.8 μA current, and occupies an active area of 0.36 mm².