A low-voltage and low-power adaptive switched-current sigma-delta ADC for bio-acquisition microsystems

An ultralow-voltage and low-power adaptive sigma-delta analog-to-digital converter (SDADC) with a 10-bit dynamic range for bio-microsystem applications is presented. The proposed SDADC includes a switched-current sigma-delta modulator (SISDM) and a digital decimator. In order to achieve the low-voltage requirement, a novel class-AB switched-current memory cell is adopted to implement the SISDM with the oversampling ratio (OSR) of 64. In addition, a proposed differential current comparator and a low-voltage 1-bit switched-current digit-to-analog converter (SIDAC) are used for the design of the SDM. Benefits from the SISDM using the class-AB memory cell are low power consumption and high dynamic range. Moreover, a new single-multiplier structure is presented to implement the finite-impulse-response (FIR) digital filters which are the major hardware elements in the decimator. For the various applications with different biosignal frequencies, the SDADC could be manipulated in different operating modes. The overall ADC has been implemented in a TSMC 0.18-μm 1P6M standard CMOS process technology. Without a voltage booster to raise the gate voltage of switches, measurement results show that the SISDM has a dynamic range over 60 dB and a power consumption of 180 μW with an input signal of 1.25-kHz sinusoid wave and 5-kHz bandwidth under a single 0.8-V power supply for electroneurography signals. In addition, the postlayout simulations of SDADC including SISDM and decimator reveal that the dynamic range is still over 60 dB without degrading by digital circuits.