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Summary An analog background calibration approach is presented for the full calibration of pipeline analog‐to‐digital converters (ADCs). A well‐trained neural network acts close to the ideal 1.5‐bit stage, and its residue is compared with the real 1.5‐bit stage including gain error and amplifier nonlinearities. The detected error is used to compensate for the imperfect residue using four calibration polynomial coefficients. The corrected residue enters the second stage of the pipeline ADC and follows a normal path to achieve high resolution. The introduced structure is verified in a 12‐bit pipelined ADC composed of 11 stages; the first 10 stages have a 1.5‐bit structure, while the last stage is a 2‐bit flash. The sampling frequency is 100 MHz, and 10% non‐ideal factors (5% for each of the nonlinear and gain errors and 10% for the aggregated error) are considered for the first stage, while the input is 19.5 MHz sinusoidal waveform. A random noise is applied to the input to limit the effective number of bits (ENOB) to almost 11.8. The evaluation parameters of the ADC are extracted, signal‐to‐noise and distortion ratio increases from 39.14 to 72.91 dB, spurious free dynamic range improves from 40.94 to 79.69 dB, and the ENOB enhances from 6.2 to 11.82. The presented mechanism shows an acceptable accuracy in the high‐speed and high‐resolution ADCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary A ripple carry adder (RCA) structure is presented which can concurrently correct a gain error in low‐resolution pipeline analog‐to‐digital converters (ADCs). The RCA is composed of a new swing‐boosted full adder (FA) based on the transmission gate (TG) technique. So, it is low‐power, high‐speed, and full‐swing with high driving capability. In 90 nm technology, the results of power, delay, and power‐delay‐product (PDP) of the FA are 1.5296 μW, 2.1141 ns, and 3.2337 fJ, respectively. The RCA with an area of 408.09 μm2 is evaluated by a 3‐bit pipeline ADC with 1.5‐bit per stage. When the erroneous codes are passed through the RCA, the maximum and minimum integral nonlinearity (INL) are improved by 19.83% and 90.98%, while the maximum and minimum of the differential nonlinearity (DNL) are improved by 50%, and 42.06%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Sophisticated systems take advantage of approximate circuits for energy management. A gate‐level structure is introduced to make a novel imprecise full adder (FA) cell by the gate diffusion input (GDI) strategy. The carbon nanotube field‐effect transistor (CNTFET) technology lowers the FA power, and the swing issue is resolved by the dynamic threshold (DT) technique. The FA specifications are 10 transistors, two internal nodes, 0.191‐μm2 area, three errors, and an error rate (ER) of 37.5%. Some inputs are directly passed to the final stage of the FA to reduce the delay and dynamic power. The FA is used in three 4:2 compressors with 12, 16, and 20 transistors, respectively. The compressors are based on the modified stacking concept to attain low power, small area, and high speed. The compressors are used up in the partial product reduction tree (PPRT) of a new 8‐bit inexact multiplier. Regarding the multiplier, the power–delay product (PDP) is decreased by 25.21%, and the normalized mean error distance (NMED) shows high accuracy. An imprecise discrete cosine transform (DCT) is implemented by the multiplier for image compression, and compared with the literature, the peak signal‐to‐noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index metric (SSIM) are amended by 8.26% and 7.29%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The performance of the programmable integrated circuits (ICs) like digital signal processors (DSPs), central processing units (CPUs), and microcontrollers is highly dependent on the magnitude comparators. This article presents a new reliable and efficient 1‐bit comparator based on carbon nanotube field‐effect transistors (CNTFETs) technology. The gate diffusion input (GDI) technique is used to reduce the number of transistors. Also, single swing restoration (SR) transistors and transmission gate (TG) techniques are combined to attain full‐swing outputs with high driving capability. The low internal capacitances and the fewer number of internal nodes of the proposed comparator make it low‐power both in single‐bit and multibit (2‐bit, 4‐bit, 8‐bit, and 16‐bit) implementations. Variations analyses of the circuit and technology parameters are performed that show the cell efficiency. From the layout results, the 1‐bit and 16‐bit comparators occupy 0.1944 μm2 and 37.485 μm2 as the total die area, respectively. The proposed circuit is implemented in image processing in which the best performance compared with state‐of‐the‐art designs regarding hardware complexity, circuitry performance, and image quality assessments are confirmed, by at least 50% improvements of different critical parameters. The resulted figure of merits nominates the cell for future ICs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]