Low Power Low Voltage ADC

wjaachen said:

Hello everybody,
I am a PhD student from Germany. I am going to design a low power low voltage integrated ADC for the application of temperature measurement. I learned basic knowledge of ADC in the university, but I have not designed it before. So I have a lot of questions:
1. How should I begin with this design? Is there any good paper to read?
2. Does low voltage mean the same thing as low power for ADC?
3. There are many structures of ADC, such like flash ADC, SAR ADC, pipeline ADC, etc. Which one ist adapted for the low power ADC?
4. Is SNR so important that I must calculate it for the ADC? Or can I just implement one of the ADCs in transistor level in cadence and simulate and test it, whether this ADC good or not?

Thank You very much for Your help!

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pixel said:

1.
At first define specifications... at least preliminary...
for example 12 bit adc, with 100ms conversion time...
book:
PRECISION TEMPERATURE SENSORS IN CMOS TECHNOLOGY

2.
No

3. SAR with capacitive DAC
or delta sigma

4.
Capacitors has to be large enough in order to avoid kT/C noise...
(For example 12b SAR total capacitance >10pF)
You have to calculate mismatch in order to see how much is your accuracy.

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wjaachen said:

Thank you very much !
But the question is, why is low voltage not equal low power? The power dissipation is proportional to the supply voltage, isn't it?
How about pipeline ADC? Does it have lower power lost than other ADC, such as SAR ADC?

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