A Power-Efficient Clock Circuit and Output Serializing Technique Integrated in a 12-bit 10-GS/s ADC

This paper introduces a dual main clock generator (DMCG) and a digital serializer (DS) to improve the power efficiency of the time-interleaving (TI) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). The proposed DMCG combines a dual-path front end and an improved selecting signal generator that addresses the potential phase error and reduces the peak current of the clock-driving circuits by 60%. The DS is proposed to serialize the digital outputs without employing power-hungry inverter-based buffer chains thus reducing the power consumption by 39.2%. The reference-free time skew extraction algorithm (RFA) is presented to mitigate the accuracy deterioration due to selecting the fixed middle channel. These techniques are validated by a prototype 12-bit 10-GS/s TI pipelined successive approximation register (TI-Pi-SAR) ADC. Fabricated in a 28-nm CMOS process, the prototype chip occupies an area of 4.4 mm2. The measurement results show that the ADC achieves a 49.8 dB SNDR and 60.0 dB SFDR after calibration at Nyquist frequency, while the total power consumption is 270 mW, leading to the figure of merits of Schreier (FoM $_{\mathrm {S}}$ ) and Walden (FoM $_{\mathrm {W}}$ ) of 152.5 dB and 106.9 fJ/conv.-step, respectively.