A 2.5 V 109 dB DR ΔΣ ADC for Audio Application

— A 2.5 V feed-forward second-order delta-sigma modulator for audio application is presented. A 9-level quantizer with a tree-structured dynamic element matching (DEM) was employed to improve the linearity by shaping the distortion resulted from the capacitor mismatch of the feedback digital-to-analog converter (DAC). A chopper stabilization technique (CHS) is used to reduce the flicker noise in the first integrator. The prototype delta-sigma analog-to-digital converter (ADC) implemented in a 65 nm 1P8M CMOS process occupies 0.747 mm 2 and achieves 109.1 dB dynamic range (DR), 85.4 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in a 24 kHz audio signal bandwidth, while consuming 14.75 mW from a 2.5 V supply. Index Terms —Delta-sigma modulator, feed-forward, dynamic element matching, chopper stabilization I. I NTRODUCTION Recent advances of CMOS technology have enabled the high quality signal processing in the multi-media and communication systems and have resulted in a great demand for the high resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). Among various ADC architectures, the delta-sigma ADC offers high dynamic range by using oversampling and noise shaping properties. Moreover, as it requires only simple and relatively high-tolerance analog components with fast and complex digital signal processing to achieve high resolution, it is very well-suited for the digital CMOS process. The theoretical signal-to-quantization noise ratio (SQNR) of the delta-sigma ADC is given by Eq. (1)