Hao Ding

This paper presents a 20 GS/s four-channel time-interleaved sample-and-hold amplifier (SHA), which aims to improve the harmonic distortion performance, eliminate the common-mode voltage fall in track-to-hold transition, and solve the difficulty of timing mismatch calibration among different sampling channels. In data path, the harmonic distortion of the track-hold switch is optimized by introducing a distortion-improving resistor into the switched emitter follower. The common-mode voltage fall is eliminated by an inserted delay-regulating resistor. Additionally, broadband data buffers are utilized to further guarantee a wide bandwidth. In clock path, an interpolator-based phase regulator in analog domain is implemented to calibrate the timing mismatch, hence avoiding the large area cost and complicated algorithm in the digital domain. Fabricated in a 0.18 μm SiGe BiCMOS process, the experimental results show that the SHA achieves a bandwidth of 16 GHz and a total harmonic distortion of −39.6 to approximately −51.8 dB with a −3 dBm input. By applying the proposed sampling phase regulator, the timing mismatch can be optimized to satisfy the requirement of 6-bit resolution at a 4 × 5 GS/s sampling rate. The proposed SHA shows prominent performance on both bandwidth and linearity, which makes it suitable for ultra-high-speed communication networks.

A 5 GS/s 8-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) implemented in 0.18 μm SiGe BiCMOS technology has been demonstrated. The proposed ADC is based on two-channel time-interleaved architecture, and each sub-ADC employs a two-stage cascaded folding and interpolating topology of radix-4. An open loop track-and-hold amplifier with enhanced linearity is designed to meet the dynamic performance requirement. The on-chip self-calibration technique is introduced to compensate the interleaving mismatches between two sub-ADCs. Measurement results show that the spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) stays above 44.8 dB with a peak of 53.52 dB, and the effective number of bits (ENOB) is greater than 5.8 bit with a maximum of 6.97 bit up to 2.5 GS/s. The ADC exhibits a differential nonlinearity (DNL) of -0.31/+0.23 LSB (least significant bit) and an integral nonlinearity (INL) of -0.68/+0.68 LSB, respectively. The chip occupies an area of 3.9 × 3.6 mm², consumes a total power of 2.8 W, and achieves a figure of merit (FoM) of 10 pJ/conversion step.