This paper presents a 7.5 GS/s, 4.5 bit flash analog-to-digital converter (ADC) for high-speed backplane communication. A two-stage track-and-hold (T/H) structure enables high input bandwidth and low power consumption at the same time. A sampling clock duty cycle control technique, which allocates more tracking time to the bandwidth-limited second T/H stage, facilitates high sampling rates. A digital offset correction scheme compensates both random and systematic offsets due to process variation and T/H amplifier gain nonlinearity, simultaneously. Two test-chip prototypes were fabricated in a 65 nm CMOS process. Experimental results of a standalone ADC chip demonstrate 3.8 effective number of bits (ENOB) at 7.5 GS/s. The figure-of-merit (FOM) of the standalone ADC is 0.49 pJ/conversion-step. The second test chip combines two ADCs together in order to demonstrate a time-interleaved ADC (TI-ADC) for use in high-speed backplane receivers. The TI-ADC operates at 10.24 GS/s while achieving 3.5 ENOB and 0.65 pJ/conversion-step FOM.

Demand for higher throughput backplane communications, coupled with a desire for design portability and flexibility, has led to high-speed backplane receivers that use front-end analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and digital equalization. Unfortunately, power and complexity of such receivers can be high and require careful design. This paper presents a parameterized ADC-based backplane receiver model that facilitates design-space exploration to optimize the tradeoffs between power and performance-an accurate behavioral model of front-end ADCs is presented for performance estimation and detailed power models for the digital equalizer (EQ) blocks are developed for power estimation. Model-based simulations suggest that comparator offset correction resolution is the most critical ADC design parameter when an overall receiver performance is concerned. Further receiver design-space exploration reveals that a Pareto optimal frontier exists, which can be used as a guideline to set the initial receiver configurations depending on a given power and performance constraints.

High-speed ADC-based backplane receivers often suffer from high power consumption and complexity and require careful designs. This paper discusses circuit- and system-level design considerations for such receivers. A low-power, high-speed front-end ADC circuit and a high-level design-space exploration of ADC-based receivers are presented.

A 7.5-GS/s 4.5-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in 65nm CMOS is presented. A two-stage track-and-hold (TAH) with clock duty cycle control reduces bandwidth requirements on the slow TAH output to enable high sampling rates with low power consumption. The 7.5-GS/s flash ADC consumes 52-mW and occupies 0.01-mm ² . Clock duty cycle control improves ENOB from 3.5 to 3.8 with an input sinusoid at the Nyquist frequency.