The comparator, particularly in high-resolution SAR converters, whose gain requirements are immense, often dominates power consumption. However, as mentioned in Section 3.2.1, because of its nonlinear operation, it can be highly power efficient. In particular, it can leverage regeneration, where a single-stage amplifier continuously feeds back its output to enhance a slight input perturbation (76). Unfortunately, regenerative structures typically suffer from large input offsets, and, where absolute analog-to-digital conversion is required, less efficient nonregenerative preceding amplifiers, whose offsets can be corrected, are used. Alternatively, offset compensation can be used as in the regenerative latch as described in Reference 73 and shown in Figure 11b. First, two paths are used here to select between a high-resolution 12b mode and a low-power 8b mode for dynamic power-performance scaling. Second, in both cases, the gain requirement of the less-efficient linear preamplifiers is reduced by offset compensation in the regenerative latch. Within the latch, multiple feedback loops are used to store the offset correction biasing on an auxiliary input, such that the latch can be reset without requiring an explicit autozeroing input reference before every decision. Importantly, all of the feedback structures reuse the same bias current, leading to a highly power-efficient implementation.
Oversampling ADC.Oversampling converters use a low-resolution ADC (e.g., 1-bit) whose output is subtracted from the input sample and integrated; the output of the integrator is repeatedly converted (commonly up to 256 times) so that the average of all ADC conversions is a high-resolution digital representation of the input. Because only a low-resolution ADC is required, which can be implemented with a comparator, this architecture can be highly power efficient. Typically, the integrator is implemented with an OTA; however, its linearity is not critical, and therefore its power consumption can be acceptable. Further, highly digital implementations of the averaging decimation filter and comparator imply that advanced power management can benefit the efficiency and scalability of oversampling ADCs considerably (3). Unfortunately, however, because they require many samples for each conversion, one-time biomedical events can not be detected, limiting their applicability somewhat.
High-speed ADC.To achieve increased ADC performance, the approach of parallelism, introduced in Section 3.2.2 for digital circuits, can be applied. An efficient architecture, such as the SAR ADC, can be time-interleaved, with each channel operating closer to sub-Vt (77, 78).
With time-interleaved converters, however, mismatch and timing skew between channels can cause significant degradation in the overall performance. Alternatively, a pipeline architecture can be used where each bit is converted by a separate stage that also amplifies the residue voltage by 2 and passes the result to the subsequent stage for further conversion (79) (generally, each stage can convert any number of bits, but for simplicity, a 1 bit per stage example is discussed here). Because each input sample is processed by the same sequence of stages, mismatch and timing skew are precluded. Unfortunately, however, the need for precise gain-by-2 has conventionally required highly linear OTAs, as shown in the configuration of Figure 12a, which, as mentioned in Section 3.2.1, can consume a lot of power. Effectively, the OTA applies negative feedback to force all of the sampled residue voltage charge from C1 on to C2, giving an output voltage of 2VIN.