Reference voltage generation in high-speed pipelined Analog-to-Digital Converters

In this paper, the most critical reference voltage generation issues in high-speed (several hundreds of MSamples/s) pipelined Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADC) are discussed. Due to inductance of the bonding wires, large on-chip filtering capacitors are needed for stable references, when the generation is done off-chip. Through the simulations it is illustrated how the bonding wire inductances and amount of on-chip capacitance affects on the ADC performance (effective number of bits, ENOB). Effect of an additional 50-pF close-to-chip filtering capacitance is verified experimentally.