New swapping technique for background calibration of capacitor mismatch and amplifier finite DC-gain in pipeline ADCs

Abstract

A novel swapping technique for stage non-linear error calibration in Pipeline ADCs (analogue-to-digital converters) is presented in this paper. The proposed algorithm obtains an estimation of the mismatch between sampling capacitors in the MDAC (multiplying digital-to-analogue converter) inside each stage, without the necessity of interrupting the ADC operation, and therefore, suitable for background calibration applications. The technique also shows its applicability for the amplifier finite DC-gain error, providing a low-cost solution for full calibration of the main static errors in the Pipeline topology with less convergence time, memory resources and simpler calibration hardware than other existing calibration methods. In addition, this work overcomes practical limitations of previous adaptive approaches based on capacitor swapping by introducing a novel modulation scheme. This new scheme minimizes the impact on the analogue part and employs a very simple digital modulation logic.