Design and Measurement of a CT ADC With Switched-Capacitor Switched-Resistor Feedback

The performance of traditional continuous-time (CT) delta-sigma analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is limited by their large sensitivity to feedback pulse-width variations caused by clock jitter in their feedback digital-to-analog converters (DACs). To mitigate that effect, we propose a modified switched-capacitor (SC) feedback DAC technique, with a variable switched series resistor (SR). The architecture has the additional benefit of reducing the typically high SC DAC output peak currents, resulting in reduced slew-rate requirements for the loop-filter integrators. A theoretical investigation is carried out which provides new insight into the synthesis of switched-capacitor with switched series resistor (SCSR) DACs with a specified reduction of the pulse-width jitter sensitivity and minimal power consumption and complexity. To demonstrate the concept and to verify the reduced pulse-width jitter sensitivity a 5 mW, 312 MHz, second order, low-pass, 1-bit, CT modulator with SCSR feedback was implemented in a 1.2 V, 90 nm, RF-CMOS process. An SNR of 66.4 dB and an SNDR of 62.4 dB were measured in a 1.92 MHz bandwidth. The sensitivity to wideband clock phase noise was reduced by 30 dB compared to a traditional switched-current (SI) return-to-zero (RZ) DAC.