A Symmetric Group Control Dynamic Element Matching Method Applied in High Resolution SAR ADCs for Biomedical Applications

Abstract

Capacitor mismatch plays an important part in the spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) performance of high-resolution successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). This paper presents a symmetric group control dynamic element matching (SGCDEM) method aiming at enhancing SFDR of SAR ADCs applied in biomedical applications. The proposed scheme symmetrically divides the capacitor array into four sub-DACs, using quantization results corresponding to each sub-DAC as rotary control codes to symmetrically control the rotation of the capacitors. In order to improve the energy efficiency and save chip area, the proposed method replaces the pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) with quantization results of ADC as the rotary control code. Moreover, split rotator technology is applied in the proposed scheme to reduce the number of multiplexers (MUX) used in the rotator, which introduces a low logic depth. The proposed architecture has been implemented on a 12-bit SAR ADC model in MATLAB in order to verify its performances. After taking a standard deviation of 1% for the unit capacitance into consideration, this method achieves above 77.3[Formula: see text]dB SFDR, enabling to correct the SFDR by more than 23.6[Formula: see text]dB compared with the structure without DEM.