Design Of Analog To Digital Converter Based On Memristive Device

Moore’s Law, the semiconductor industry’s obsession with the shrinking of transistors and their commensurate steady doubling on a chip about every 2 years, has lead a 50-year technical and economic revolution. With the rapid development of information and communication technology, the demands on the performance of the digital signal processing devices is getting higher and higher. As an important part of digital signal processing device, analog-to-digital convertor directly restricts the performance of digital signal processing device. Traditional transistor, however, is going to reach the size limitation making circuit design facing more and more technical bottleneck. For this reason, the design of ADC needs more innovation in respect of process, device and circuit structure.Recent years, a new two terminal device named memristor has attracted the attention of researchers from all over the world due to its simple structure, high speed and compatible with traditional CMOS process. Combined with transistors in a hybrid chip, memristors could radically improve the performance of circuits without shrinking transistors. Three different high performance ADC combining memristor and MOS device are designed in this paper. The main contents include the following items.The device structure, material properties, electrical characteristics, and physical mechanism of memristive devices are discussed, with a focus on the use of memristive device for memory, analogy circuit, digital circuit, and artificial neuron network. The correlation of memristive devices with both analog and digital signals makes memristive devices perfect medium for analog to digital converting. A ADC based on bipolar resistive switching device, a ADC based on frequency comparator, and a ADC based on linear memristive device are designed. The operating principle of ADC designed in this paper is discussed.Finally, the presented ADC is simulated and the performance of each structure is analyzed. Compared with traditional ADC, the new ADC presented in this paper has higher performance.