| Due to the rapid growth of the communication market, a large amount of research is in process toward a high speed and high resolution sigma-delta A/D converter. This dissertation focuses on the design of a single-stage sigma-delta A/D converter with very low oversampling ratio for the wireless application. An architecture for a multibit single-stage delta-sigma A/D converter with two-step quantization is proposed. Both the MSB and LSB signals produced by the two-step quantization are fed back simultaneously to all integrator stages, making it suitable for low oversampling ratios. The two-step ADC avoids the problem that the complexity of an internal flash ADC increases exponentially with each added bit. A segmented architecture with coarse/fine DEM and DAC is proposed to reduce the complexity of DEM and DAC due to the large internal quantizer. The consequence of the segmentation, mismatch between coarse and fine DACs can be noise-shaped by using a digital requantization (REQ) algorithm. A second-order single-stage sigma-delta A/D converter with 8-bit two-step inner quantization is proposed in this dissertation, which employs the feed-forward branches to reduce the integrator output swing. The proposed modulator is implemented with TSMC 0.25 mum mixed-signal process, using the switched-capacitor circuit. The measured system achieves the dynamic range of 70 dB under an oversampling ratio of 16 with the REQ algorithm reducing the noise floor in the signal bandwidth by 20 dB. |
