A 10-bit 50-MS/s SAR ADC for dual-voltage domain portable systems

The analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is an essential component providing the interface between the sensed analog signal and the corresponding digital representation for a portable ultrasonic systems. In order to extend the battery life for the portable system, a low-voltage ADC is crucial for saving the power. However, the sensed analog signal is usually larger than the tolerable range of a low-voltage ADC. A level shifter, which possibly consumes more power than ADC, is therefore adopted to solve this problem. This paper presents a 10-bit 50-MS/s successive approximation register (SAR) ADC by manipulating simple but effective circuit design techniques to operate at dualvoltage domain without the need of an additional level shifter for shrinking the input signals. Particularly, we propose a technique to implement the ADC with 3.3-V I/O devices and 1.2V MOS transistors. The proof-of-concept design was fabricated in TSMC 130-nm 1P8M CMOS technology. It consumes 1.6 mW at a 50 MS/s sampling frequency and about 2 MHz sinusoidal input signal with 1.65V input common-mode voltage and 2Vp-p differential input amplitude. The measurement result shows an ENOB of 9.15 bits, and both the DNL and INL are within 1 LSB. The active area is 0.226 mm².