Analysis and Design of Wideband Filtering ADCs Using Continuous-Time Pipelining

Abstract

We describe the advantages and challenges encoun- tered during the design of wideband continuous-time pipeline (CTP) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). The converter incor- porates an area- and power-efficient foreground technique that exploits thermal noise to estimate the taps of digital recon- struction filters of the pipeline. The design features a half-rate mode that exploits the sharp filtering characteristic of the CTP to reduce the back-end sampling rate, thereby lowering power dissipa