An energy efficient symmetrical DAC switching scheme for single-ended SAR ADCs with zero reset energy and a 3-stage common-mode insensitive regenerative comparator.

A state-of-the-art energy-efficient digital-to-analog converter (DAC) switching scheme suitable for single-ended successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme synthesizes two reference voltages V r e f and V q to generate relevant voltage levels. The reference voltage V q is a quarter of the V r e f. To ease logic design, the V r e f is only utilized during the third phase of conversion with the MSB capacitor of each DAC. The proposed scheme reduces DAC's average switching energy and the area by 94.44 % and 50 % in comparison with the conventional single-ended scheme. Furthermore, a novel 3-stage common-mode insensitive regenerative comparator is proposed to reduce non-linearity errors caused by common-mode voltage variations of DAC. The proposed single-ended ADC is simulated in a standard 65-nm CMOS technology with a resolution of 8-bit and sampling rate of 25 MS/s. The simulation results corroborate that the ADC consumes 124 µW power with 1.2 V supply voltage and attain a 7.23 effective number of bits, resulting in a 33fJ/conversion step FOM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]