All-Pass Delays and Residue Amplifier for a 10-GS/s Non-Blocking Subranging ADC

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2025-01-08
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Abstract

Delay circuits play a critical role in various applications, notably, in recent years, analog delays have been utilized in certain analog-to-digital converter (ADC) architectures, including continuous-time pipelined ADCs (CTP-ADCs) and non-blocking subranging ADCs (NBSADCs), where they help improve the overall ADC speed and/or resolution. In this work, the proposed delay circuits are specifically tailored for a 10-GS/s, 8-bit non-blocking subranging ADC (NBS-ADC) intended for radio telescope applications. First, this thesis proposes a high-order all-pass-filter (APF) circuit topology. The design process and tunability are explored using both TSMC 65-nm-CMOS and 22-nm FDSOI CMOS technologies. The proposed 6th-order APF, implemented in TSMC 65-nm-CMOS, achieves a delay range from 250 ps (BW10%=0–8 GHz) to 400ps (BW10%=0–5 GHz) having the state-of-the-art DBW10%=2. Additionally, 3rd- and 4th-order APFs were subsequently designed in GlobalFoundries 22-nm FDSOI CMOS for a 5G beamforming receiver operating from 24.3 to 28.7 GHz. The 3rd- and 4th-order APFs exhibited 9-to-21 and 21-to-36 ps delay ranges, respectively, to generate beams from 0° to 35°. Also, in further steps we sought a solution to eliminate inductors entirely, leading to the design of a compact, inductorless, cascadable GHz-frequency APF delay circuit. Results obtained using a TSMC 65-nm-CMOS containing 4 cascaded APF cells, exhibiting a delay tuning range of 300 to 500 ps over a 0.1-to-4-GHz bandwidth. The filter occupies an active area of 0.04 mm2 and dissipates 6.2 mW/cell from a 1.3-V supply. The APF achieved a delay-per-area metric that is at least 1.6 times greater than that of previous gm-C APFs, while also operating across a wider bandwidth. It exhibited a high delay-bandwidth product (DBW) of 1.95, all while maintaining a gain of 3.3 dB. Finally, we presented a novel residue generation and amplification (RGA) stage that employs inductive peaking and a tunable-gain post-amplifier reaching a high gain and a wide bandwidth, for a 10-GS/s, 8-bit NBS-ADC intended for radio telescope applications.

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Kabirkhoo, Z. (2025). All-pass delays and residue amplifier for a 10-GS/s non-blocking subranging ADC (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.