Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2007. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 77-81). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Data converters, i.e., analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and digital-to-analog converters (DACs), are interface circuits between the analog and digital domains. They are used in, e.g., digital audio applications, data communication applications, and other types of applications where conversion between analog and digital signal representation is required. This work covers different aspects related to modeling, error correction, and implementation of DACs for communication applications where the requirements on the circuits in terms of speed and linearity are hard. The DAC architecture considered in this work is the current-steering DAC, which is the most commonly used architecture for high-speed applications. Transistor-level simulation of complex circuits using accurate transistor models require long simulation times. A transistor-level model of a DAC used in a system simulation is likely to be a severe bottleneck limiting the overall system simulation speed. Moreover, investigations of stochastic parameter variations require multiple simulation runs with different parameter values making transistor-level models unsuitable. Therefore, there is a need for behavioral-level models with reasonably short simulation times. Behavioral-level models can also be used to find the requirements on different building blocks on high abstraction levels, enabling the use of efficient topdown design methodologies. Models of different nonideal properties in current-steering DACs are used and developed in this work. Static errors typically dominates the low-frequency behavior of the DAC. One of the limiting factors for the static linearity of a current-steering DAC is mismatch between current sources. A well-known model of this problem is used extensively in this work for evaluation of different ideas and techniques for linearity enhancement. The highfrequency behavior of the DAC is typically dominated by dynamic errors. Models oftwo types of dynamic errors are developed in this work. These are the dynamic errors caused by parasitic capacitance in wires and transistors and glitches caused by asymmetry in the settling behavior of a current source. The encoding used for the digital control word in a current steering DAC has a large influence on the circuit performance, e.g., in terms static linearity and glitches. In this work, two DAC architectures are developed. These are denoted the decomposed and partially decomposed architectures and utilize encoding strategies aiming at a high circuit performance by avoiding unnecessary switching of current sources. The developed architectures are compared with the well-known binary-weighted and segmented architectures using behavioral-level simulations. It can be hard to meet a DAC design specification using a straightforward implementation. Techniques for compensation of errors that can be applied to improve the DAC linearity are studied. The well-known dynamic element matching (DEM) techniques are used for transforming spurious tones caused by matching errors into white or shaped noise. An overview of these techniques are given in this work and a DEM technique for the decomposed DAC architecture is developed. In DS modulation, feedback of the quantization error is utilized to spectrally shape the quantization noise to reduce its power within the signal band. A technique based on this principle is developed for spectral shaping of DAC nonlinearity errors utilizing a DAC model in a feedback loop. Two examples of utilization of the technique are given. Four different current-steering DACs implemented in CMOS technology are developed to enable comparison between behavioral-level simulations and measurements on actual implementations and to provide platforms for evaluation of different techniques for linearity improvement. For example, a 14-bit DEM DAC is implemented and measurement results are compared with simulation results. A good agreement between measured and simulated results is obtained. Moreover, a configurable 12-bit DAC capable of operating with different degrees of segmentation and decomposition is implemented to evaluate the proposed decomposed architecture. Measurement results agree with results from behavioral-level simulations and indicate that the decomposed architecture is a viable alternative to the commonly used segmented architecture.

Most present day implementations of delta-sigma modulators are discrete-time ones using switched-capacitor circuits. A resistor-capacitor (RC) implementation of a delta-sigma analog to digital converter (ADC) does not use switched capacitor (SC) technology. While SC implementation has the advantages of being discrete-time, no resistors used and improved stability control, RC implementation has the advantage of no switches being used (other than quantizer) and therefore a simpler circuit implementation. Continuous-time implementations can achieve lower thermal noise levels than switched capacitor modulators. Butterworth Multi-stage Noise Shaping (MASH) architecture is one of the promising architectures to implement in continuous-time domain. For a convenient design and quantization noise spectrum shaping of a delta sigma data converter, it's highly desirable for the Noise Transfer Function (NTF) to take the form of a high-pass filter. The MASH architecture was introduced to overcome stability problems commonly faced beyond a second order structure. Delta-sigma data converters are new converter designs that are preferred for integrated circuits and for high-resolution applications. It is highly desirable for the NTF of delta-sigma data converters to take the form of conventional highpass filters for convenient design purposes and shaping of the quantization noise spectrum. However, conventional delta-sigma architectures allow for only low orders and very low cutoff frequencies for such highpass filters, otherwise the converter becomes unstable. In previous projects it was found that a MASH implementation (each stage being second order) of a delta-sigma data converter where the NTF of each stage is a Butterworth highpass filter holds much promise. This current project is to accomplish RC implementation of fourth-order Butterworth MASH delta-sigma data converter. The circuit design procedure will be shown, starting with the desired NTF characteristics, and yielding the required parameters for the RC integrators with gains that are determined from the desired transfer function. The circuit simulation, yielding the bit stream frequency spectrum and the signal to noise ratio, will be based on Mentor Graphics Eldo SPICE simulations. The performance and characteristics of the circuit is fully analyzed and documented for a wide variety of variations and test conditions. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering. / "August 2006." / Includes bibliographic references (leaves 41-43).

Delta sigma data converters have found to be of greater interest for almost 40 years now. Continuous time implementation of these converters, especially for high speed and low power applications has been very challenging. Here in this thesis we have discussed Resistor Capacitor (RC) implementation of Chebyshev Type II high pass Noise Transfer Function (NTF). RC implementation has its own advantages compared to that of a Switched Capacitor (SC) circuit. While SC implementation has the advantages of being discrete-time, no resistors used, and improved stability control, RC implementation has the advantage of no switches being used (other than the quantizer) and therefore a simpler circuit implementation. In this thesis the details of the design and analysis of a fourth order RC delta sigma data converter will be given. The NTF is that of a fourth-order Chebyshev Type II highpass filter, where the noise is high passed and removed using a low pass filter and the signal remains constant across the low frequency band. The circuit implementation consists of four RC integrators with gain stages that are determined from the desired transfer function. The feedback loop includes of a sample and hold circuit followed by a one-bit quantizer: these are the only nonlinear elements in the circuit design. The circuit design procedure will be given, starting with the desired NTF characteristics, and yielding the required gain parameters for the four integrator circuit architecture, obtained to implement the requiredH(s). MATLAB is used for easy computation. The circuit simulation, yielding the bit stream frequency spectrum and the signal to noise ratio, will be based on Mentor Graphics Eldo SPICE simulations. The overall performance achieves the equivalent of 11 bits. This is obtained from a fourth order circuit, using RC implementation. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 37-38) / "December 2006."

The miniaturization and digitization of modern microelectronic systems have made Analog-to-Digital converters (ADC) key building components in many applications. Internet and entertainment technologies demand higher and higher performance from the hardware components in many communication and multimedia systems, but at the same time increased mobility demands less and less power consumption. Many applications, such as instrumentation, video, radar and communications, require very high accuracy and speed and with resolutions up to 16 bits and sampling rates in the 100s of MHz, pipelined ADCs are very suitable for such purposes. Resolutions above 10 bits often require very high power consumption and silicon area if no error correction technique is employed. Calibration relaxes the accuracy requirement of the individual building blocks of the ADC and enables power and area savings. Digital calibration is preferred over analog calibration due to higher robustness and accuracy. Furthermore, the microprocessors that process the digital information from the ADCs have constantly reduced cost and power consumption and improved performance due to technology scaling and innovative microprocessor architectures. The work in this dissertation presents a novel digital background calibration technique for high-speed, high-resolution pipelined ADCs. The technique is implemented in a 14 bit, 100 MS/s pipelined ADC fabricated in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) 0.13µm Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) digital technology. The prototype ADC achieves better than 11.5 bits linearity at 100 MS/s and achieves a best-in-class figure of merit of 360 fJ/conversion-step. The core ADC has a power consumption of 105 mW and occupies an active area of 1.25 mm^2. The work in this dissertation also presents a low-power, 8-bit algorithmic ADC. This ADC reduces power consumption at system level by minimizing voltage reference generation and ADC input capacitance. This ADC is implemented in International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) 90nm digital CMOS technology and achieves around 7.5 bits linearity at 0.25 MS/s with a power consumption of 300 µW and an active area of 0.27 mm^2.

Modern communication systems require higher data rates which have increased thedemand for high speed transceivers. For a system to work efficiently, all blocks ofthat system should be fast. It can be seen that analog interfaces are the main bottleneckin whole system in terms of speed and power. This fact has led researchersto develop high speed analog to digital converters (ADCs) with low power consumption.Among all the ADCs, flash ADC is the best choice for faster data conversion becauseof its parallel structure. This thesis work describes the design of such a highspeed and low power flash ADC for analog front end (AFE) of a transceiver. Ahigh speed highly linear track and hold (TnH) circuit is needed in front of ADCwhich gives a stable signal at the input of ADC for accurate conversion. Twodifferent track and hold architectures are implemented, one is bootstrap TnH andother is switched source follower TnH. Simulations show that high speed with highlinearity can be achieved from bootstrap TnH circuit which is selected for the ADCdesign.Averaging technique is employed in the preamplifier array of ADC to reduce thestatic offsets of preamplifiers. The averaging technique can be made more efficientby using the smaller number of amplifiers. This can be done by using the interpolationtechnique which reduces the number of amplifiers at the input of ADC. Thereduced number of amplifiers is also advantageous for getting higher bandwidthsince the input capacitance at the first stage of preamplifier array is reduced.The flash ADC is designed and implemented in 150 nm CMOS technology for thesampling rate of 1.6 GSamples/sec. The bootstrap TnH consumes power of 27.95mW from a 1.8 V supply and achieves the signal to noise and distortion ratio(SNDR) of 37.38 dB for an input signal frequency of 195.3 MHz. The ADC withideal TnH and comparator consumes power of 78.2 mW and achieves 4.8 effectivenumber of bits (ENOB).

The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate the effects of mismatch errors that occur in time-interleaved analog-to-digital converters (TI-ADC) and how these are compensated for by proprietary methods from Signal Processing Devices Sweden AB. This will be demonstrated by two different implementations, both based on the combined digitizer/generator SDR14. These demonstrations shall be done in a way that is easy to grasp for people with limited knowledge in signal processing. The first implementation is an analog video demo where an analog video signal is sampled by such an TI-ADC in the SDR14, and then converted back to analog and displayed with the help of a TV tuner. The mismatch compensation can be turned on and off and the difference on the resulting video image is clearly visible. The second implementation is a digital communication demo based on W-CDMA, implemented on the FPGA of the SDR14. Four parallel W-CDMA signals of 5 MHz are sent and received by the SDR14. QPSK, 16-QAM, and 64-QAM modulated signals were successfully sent and the mismatch effects were clearly visible in the constellation diagrams. Techniques used are, for example: root-raised cosine pulse shaping, RF modulation, carrier recovery, and timing recovery.

Time-interleaved analog-to-digital converters make use of parallelization to increase the rate at which an analog signal can be digitized. Using M channels at their maximum sampling frequency allows for an overall sampling frequency of M times the individual converters' sampling rate. However, the performance of interleaved systems suffers from mismatches between the sub-converters. Offset mismatches, gain mismatches, and timing mismatches all contribute to the degradation of the resolution of the ADC system. Offset and gain mismatches can be corrected for in the digital domain with minimal extra processing. However, the effects of timing mismatches (specifically, the magnitude of the spurious tones that are introduced) are dependent on the frequency of the input, so digital correction is not a trivial task. This makes a circuit-based correction mechanism a much more desirable solution to the problem. This work explores the effect of timing mismatches on interleaved analog-to-digital converter performance. A set of requirements is derived to specify the performance of a variable-delay circuit for the tuning of sample clocks. Since the mismatches can be composed of both fixed and random components, several candidate architectures are modeled for their delay and jitter performance. One candidate is selected for design, based on its jitter performance and on practical considerations. A practical implementation of the clock-adjustment circuit is designed, featuring low-noise differential clock paths with high precision delay adjustment. A means of testing the circuit and verifying the precision of adjustment is presented. The design is implemented for fabrication, and post-layout simulations are shown to demonstrate the feasibility and functionality of the design.

With the introduction of the floating-gate transistor into reconfigurable architectures, great advances have been made in the field. Recently, Hall et. al. have proposed the first truly large-scale field programmable analog array (FPAA). As an outgrowth of this work, a new class of FPAAs based on translinear elements has begun to be developed. The use of translinear elements, multiple input translinear elements (MITEs) specifically, allows for extreme versatility in the functions implemented by the system while keeping the computational elements of the FPAA regular. In addition, synthesis procedures have been developed for translinear elements. This facilitates the implementation of large-scale systems on the FPAA because the circuit design can be extracted using the synthesis procedures based on equations entered by the user. Two architectures are proposed for the new FPAA. The first architecture uses fine grain reconfigurability, every gate capacitor and the drain of each MITE can be connected arbitrarily, in order to create reconfigurable MITE networks. Circuits including a squaring circuit, a square root circuit, a translinear loop, a vector magnitude circuit, and a 1st-order log-domain filter were implemented using this architecture and results are presented. In addition, examples are shown to illustrate the compilation of the circuits onto the FPAA. The second proposed architecture uses a mix of fine and medium granularity in order to simplify the implementation of larger systems. Examples are given and again the compilation of the circuits onto the FPAA is shown.

Tests for detecting faults in analog and mixed-signal circuits have been traditionally derived from the datasheet speci and #64257;cations. Although these speci and #64257;cations describe important aspects of the device, in many cases these application oriented tests are costly to implement and are inefficient in determining product quality. Increasingly, the gap between speci and #64257;cation test requirements and the capabilities of test equipment has been widening. In this work, a systematic method to generate and evaluate alternate tests for detecting parametric faults is proposed. We recognize that certain aspects of analog test generation problem are not amenable to automation. Additionally, functional features of analog circuits are widely varied and cannot be assumed by the test generator. To overcome these problems, an extended device under test (DUT) model is developed that encapsulates the DUT and the DUT speci and #64257;c tasks. The interface of this model provides a well de and #64257;ned and uniform view of a large class of devices. This permits several simpli and #64257;cations in the test generator. The test generator is uses a search-based procedure that requires evaluation of a large number of candidate tests. Test evaluation is expensive because of complex fault models and slow fault simulation techniques. A tester-resident test evaluation technique is developed to address this issue. This method is not limited by simulation complexity nor does it require an explicit fault model. Making use of these two developments, an efficient and automated test generation method is developed. Theoretical development and a number of examples are used to illustrate various concepts that are presented in this thesis.