A Reconfigurable Hybrid ADC Using a Jump Search Algorithm

This paper presents a reconfigurable hybrid Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) designed specifically for bio-signal processing, aiming to achieve low power consumption and high area efficiency. The proposed ADC utilizes a combination of 10-bit Most Significant Bit (MSB) Successive Approximation Register (SAR) and 2–4-bit Least Significant Bit (LSB) Single Slope (SS) architectures. The SS architecture incorporates the Dummy Capacitor Quantization Method (DCQM) which employs a 10-bit MSB dummy capacitor. This dummy capacitor can be configured to represent the 2-LSBs or reconstruct 4-LSBs. The reconfigurability of the ADC is achieved through the control of the reset timing of a 5-bit counter enabled by an external signal. The proposed ADC was fabricated using a Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) n-well 1-poly 8-metal process. Experimental measurements revealed that the ADC operates at a speed of 454 kS/s with power consumption of 18.7 μW. The Effective Number of Bits (ENoB) achieved by the ADC is 10.9 bits based on a 14-bit scale or 10.2 bits based on a 12-bit scale. The Figure of Merit (FoM) for the ADC is calculated to be 21.5 fJ/step for the 14-bit scale and 22.1 fJ/step for the 12-bit scale.