A New Artificial Neural Network-Based Calibration Mechanism for ADCs: A Time-Interleaved ADC Case Study

This article presents a new artificial neural network (ANN)-based calibration mechanism for analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). The proposed mechanism applies ANN to realize the bijective vector recovery mapping (VRM) for nonlinearity calibration and thus effectively suppresses both harmonic distortions and spurs. A new ANN-based calibrator is designed to calibrate both single-channel nonlinearity and interchannel mismatches and significantly improve the performance of ADCs. Through signal-fitting-based training process and noise adding, the proposed mechanism and calibrator can calibrate the general nonlinearity and mismatches of ADCs, including but not limited to the typical nonideality that conventional calibration techniques commonly concern (such as interstage gain error, digital-to-analog converter (DAC) error, and timing mismatch). For verification, an on-chip ANN-based calibrator is implemented in a 12-bit 600-MS/s four-channel time-interleaved (TI) ADC prototype. The measurement results show that signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio (SNDR) and spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) are improved from 32.79 and 35.30 to 62.45 and 74.21 dB, respectively. Another off-chip ANN-based calibrator is applied to a commercial 12-bit 5.4-GS/s four-channel ADC, and the results show that the SNDR and SFDR are improved from 42.38 and 43.17 to 53.98 and 78.25 dB, respectively.