Abstract
We discuss a 12-b 18-GS/s analog-to-digital con- verter (ADC) implemented in 16-nm FinFET process. The ADC is composed of an integrated high-speed track-and-hold ampli- fier (THA) driving up to eight interleaved pipeline ADCs that employ open-loop inter-stage amplifiers. Up to 10 GS/s, the THA operates at the full sampling rate using a non-interleaved single sample network, thereby eliminating the interleaving sampling time and bandwidth mismatch. Above 10 GS/s, the THA is programmed to use two ping-ponged, or an optional (2 + 1) ran- domized, sample networks to spread the residual post-calibration interleaving spurs in the noise floor. The THA enables an input bandwidth of 18 GHz and employs dither injection and optional pseudorandom chopping. In the pipeline stages, dither-based background calibration detects and corrects gain, settling, mem- ory, and kick-back errors. New dither-based background calibra- tion algorithms are employed to detect and correct the arbitrary non-linearity in the form of integral non-linearity (INL) breaks and harmonic distortion up to the fifth order in the THA and in the references, DACs, and inter-stage open-loop amplifiers of the pipeline ADCs. Moreover, new dither-based background calibration is implemented to detect and correct the chopping non-idealities, memory errors, interleaving mismatches, and order-dependent randomization errors. Compared to the fastest state-of-the-art with similar p erformance, this ADC achieves 80% higher sample rate an