Energy-efficient switching method using input-swapping for high
resolution SAR ADCs
Abstract
This paper presents an energy-efficient digital-to-analog converter
(DAC) switching method with low common-mode variations for high
resolution successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital
converters (ADCs), while enabling to implement resolutions such as
14-bit as compared to the typical 10-bit. The proposed switching method
enables high resolution by having a nearly constant common-mode voltage
and employing input-swapping to use the reference voltage (Vref) only in
the sampling phase. This method eliminates the need for the third
reference voltage during the entire DAC switching steps, which reduces
the required number of switches even compared to the state-of-the-art
methods that use low number of switches. The use of lower number of
switches not only lowers the DAC control logic complexity, but also
results in a faster operation, lower power, and smaller area. When
compared to conventional 10-bit SAR ADCs, the proposed switching method
in a 10-bit implementation reduces the average switching energy and area
by 93.7 % and 75 %, respectively, while offering high resolution
implementation options such as 14 bits.