A 1mW 4b 1GS/s delay-line based analog-to-digital converter

In this paper we introduce a novel Analog-to-Digital architecture for high speed applications that is compatible with digital CMOS and surpasses the issues with traditional voltage conversion techniques. The quantization method is based on the delay-to-digital concept as a means to quantize a variable delay line. A 4 bit 1 GS/s ADC with 1 mW power consumption is designed in 65 nm CMOS based on the proposed architecture. The new architecture is highly scalable with CMOS technology and because of its delay-line-based core, the ADCs performance enhances with further CMOS scaling and provides a promising method for the trend toward more digital implementation of circuits.