A 0.5 v 10-bit 3 MS/s SAR ADC with adaptive-reset switching scheme and near-threshold voltage-optimized design technique

This brief presents a 10-bit ultra-low power energy-efficient successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC). A new adaptive-reset switching scheme is proposed to reduce the switching energy of the capacitive digital-to-analog converter (CDAC). The proposed adaptive-reset switching scheme reduces the average switching energy of the CDAC by 90% compared to the conventional scheme without the common-mode voltage variation. In addition, the near-threshold voltage (NTV)-optimized digital library is adopted to alleviate the performance degradation in the ultra-low supply voltage while simultaneously increasing the energy efficiency. The NTV-optimized design technique is also introduced to the bootstrapped switch design to improve the linearity of the sample-and-hold circuit. The test chip is fabricated in a 65 nm CMOS, and its core area is 0.022 mm2. At a supply of 0.5 V and sampling speed of 3 MS/s, the SAR ADC achieves an ENOB of 8.78 bit and consumes 3.09 μW. The resultant Walden figure-of-merit (FoM) is 2.34 fJ/conv.-step.