A 12-bit 8.47-fJ/Conversion-Step Capacitor-Swapping SAR ADC in 110-nm CMOS

This paper presents a 12-bit energy-efficient successive approximation register analog-to-digital converter (ADC). By incorporating the proposed capacitor-swapping technique, which eliminates the problematic MSB mismatch transition of a binary-weighted capacitor digital-to-analog converter, the 12-bit linearity of the ADC is achieved without increasing the capacitor size for improved matching. The small capacitor size results in low power consumption. In addition, an on-the-fly programmable dynamic comparator is used for quick comparisons with low noise contributions within the limited power budget. The ADC is fabricated using a 110-nm CMOS process. It consumes 16.47 mu W from a 0.9-V supply at a conversion-rate of 1 MS/s. The measured DNL and INL are within 0.3 LSB and 0.56 LSB, respectively. The measured SNDR and SFDR are at 67.3 dB and 87 dB, respectively. The ENOB performance is 10.92 b, which is equivalent to a figure-of-merit of 8.47 fJ/conversion-step.