This thesis describes the architecture and implementation of a novel 10-bit hybrid Analog to Digital Converter using Flash and Delay Line concepts. Flash ADCs employ power hungry comparators which increase the overall power consumption of a high resolution ADC. High resolution flash also requires precision analog circuit design. Delay line ADCs are based on digital circuits and operate at low power. Both Flash based ADCs and delay line based ADCs can be used to get a fast analog to digital conversion, but with limited resolution. These two approaches are combined to achieve a 10-bit resolution (4 bits using Flash and 6 bits using delay line) without compromising on speed and maintaining low power operation. Low resolution of Flash also helps in reducing the analog circuit design complexity of the voltage comparators. The ADC was capable of running at 100M samples/s, with an ENOB of 8.82 bits, consuming 8.59mW at 1.8V. / text

This thesis proposes and demonstrates Time to Digital Converters (TDC) with high resolution realized in 65-nm digital CMOS. It is used as a phase detector in all digital PLL working with 5GHz DCO and 20MHz reference input for radio transmitters. Two kinds of high resolution TDC are designed on schematic level including Vernier TDC and parallel TDC. The Sensed Amplifier Flip Flop (SAFF) is implemented with less than 1ps sampling window to avoid metastability. The current starved delay elements are adopted in the TDC and the conversion resolution is equal to the difference of the delay time from these delay elements. Furthermore, the parallel TDC is realized on layout and finally achieves the resolution of 3ps meanwhile it consumes average power 442μW with 1.2V power supply. Measured integral nonlinearity and differential nonlinearity are 0.5LSB and 0.33LSB respectively.