Design and Implementation of an Ultra-Low Power Analog-to-Digital Converter

Mobile, embedded, and remote systems require the ability to run critical, high-performance operations for long durations of time. The available energy for such applications is often limited by size constraints, cost, or inconvenience. Thus, the ability to design circuitry which can operate at low supply voltages and with little power consumption is critical for such applications. An important component in many such applications is an analog-to-digital converter (ADC), which allows for a digital processor to interpret real-world signals. Heemin Yang proposed a novel ultra-low power ADC in his Ph.D. thesis titled “A Time-Based Energy-Efficient Analogto-Digital Converter” for the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1] In this project, we implemented an ultra-low power ADC integrated circuit based on the design proposed in Yang’s thesis.