High Speed×Resolution Nyquist A/D Conversion for Low-Latency Applications

Jun Feng , Filip Tavernier Mixed-signal circuits and data converters

Our wish: The latency of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) has become a new critical aspect for some quickly evolving, modern applications. For example, this holds for wireline/optical links in data centers and fully autonomous cars. Any application with a short round-trip time or fast feedback loop will need a low-latency ADC. Therefore, we must steer away from traditional, heavily-pipelined ADCs.

Challenges: There is a great demand for high data throughput, good fidelity, and excellent ADC power efficiency. Especially above medium operation speeds, it becomes challenging to combine good power efficiency with low latency, partially due to the limits of the technology at hand. Only a handful of published works are in our target space at top conferences (see figure).

Ultimately, this means that the ADCs that cater to these evolving low-latency applications will be challenging to design for low power because the power burden (and bits) per ADC sub-stage will grow. In particular, the residue amplifier will significantly dominate the power consumption.

Our research: We designed a low-power, high-gain/precision residue amplifier to solve the above challenges. This residue amplifier will be employed in a Nyquist ADC with a minimal-latency architecture in the high-resolution, 100+ MS/s range. This prototype chip (see figure) was implemented throughout 2022-2023 and is currently being evaluated.

Get in touch
Jun Feng
Phd student
Filip Tavernier
Academic staff
Survey of state-of-the-art ADCs and corresponding power efficiency versus throughput and precision.
Survey of state-of-the-art ADCs and corresponding power efficiency versus throughput and precision.

Other research topics in Mixed-signal circuits and data converters

Ultra-High-Speed Analog Front Ends for Time-Interleaved ADCs
Mixed-signal circuits and data converters
Tim Borremans | Filip Tavernier
Ultra-High-Speed ADCs for Wireline Communication
Mixed-signal circuits and data converters
Shuangmu Li | Filip Tavernier
Low noise CMOS image sensor
Analog and power management circuits, Mixed-signal circuits and data converters
Prayag Wakale | Filip Tavernier
Pixel-Parallel Conversion for Image Sensors
Mixed-signal circuits and data converters
Rico Jossel Maestro | Filip Tavernier
THZ range detector circuit for plasmonic wave computing
Mixed-signal circuits and data converters, RF, mm-wave and THz circuits
Xuan Wu | Patrick Reynaert
A High-Speed, Energy-Efficient Time-Interleaved Analog-to-Digital Converter
Mixed-signal circuits and data converters
Zongyuan Li | Filip Tavernier
Cryo-CMOS Data Converters for Quantum Computing
Mixed-signal circuits and data converters, Quantum and cryogenic circuits
Bram Veraverbeke | Filip Tavernier

Want to work with us?

Get in touch or discover the way we can collaborate.