Flash Sharing in a Time-Interleaved Pipeline ADC

ABSTRACT With the advent of parallel processing, primarily the time-interleaved pipeline ADCs, high speed and high resolution ADCs became a possibility. When these speeds touch giga samples per second and resolutions go beyond 12-bits, the parallelization becomes more extensive leading to repeated presence of several identical blocks in the architecture. This thesis discusses one such block, the sub-ADC (Flash ADC), of the pipeline and sharing it with more than two of the parallel processing channels thereby reducing area and power and input load capacitance to each stage. This work presents a design of 'sub-ADC shared in a time-interleaved pipeline ADC' in the IBM 8HP process. It has been implemented with an offset-compensated, kickbackcompensated, fast decision making (large input bandwidth) and low power comparator that forms the core part of the design. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT