Time-based analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) have recently gained attention because of their ability to reach high sample rates with good energy efficiency. The performance of most implementations is limited by the Voltage-to-Time Converter (VTC), hence necessitating thorough analysis on its performance. This paper derives expressions for the noise and linearity of a constant-slope VTC. The derived expressions provide an explicit link between the circuit parameters and VTC performance as well as offer insight on the available trade-offs. Based on the expressions, a general design methodology for constant-slope VTCs is proposed. The simulated verification with 28-nm CMOS shows good agreement with the presented analysis and with previously measured results, thereby corroborating the proposed design methodology. The presented design methodology allows the developed understanding between the VTC circuit parameters and performance metrics to be utilized in e.g. design exploration and algorithmic circuit optimization to find an optimal set of parameters for a given target specification.

Cyclic-coupled ring oscillators (CCRO), which consist of M ring oscillators each with N inverting stages, can be used in time-domain data converters to achieve sub-gate-delay resolution and improved phase noise performance compared to a single ring oscillator (RO). However, CCROs can oscillate in several different oscillation modes, where some modes contain overlapping phases. Such in-phase oscillations severely degrade the performance of a time-domain data converter by undermining the sub-gate-delay of the CCRO. This paper presents a design method to avoid the undesired in-phase oscillation modes, and thus achieve guaranteed maximal phase resolution regardless of the oscillation mode, by properly selecting the CCRO dimensions N and M. We show, both theoretically and with transistor-level simulations, that mode-agnostic maximum phase resolution can be ensured by selecting a prime M together with an N which is co-prime with M.

Time-interleaved analog-to-digital converters (TIADC) require channel matching in terms of offset, gain, and sampling clock skew to achieve best data conversion performance. Conventionally, correction of skew mismatch is realized with analog delay lines, making it challenging for high-speed ADC designs to achieve fine delay resolution over wide tuning range while maintaining low clock jitter. Digital skew correction allows greater flexibility than analog solutions, but is hindered by a significant hardware footprint. This paper demonstrates digital filter-based timing skew correction approach suitable for on-chip implementation. In a 10-bit 8-channel TI-ADC the proposed structure corrects mismatch magnitudes up to 0.12 sample period across 0.9 Nyquist band while requiring only 65% hardware of similar architectures of equivalent performance. The presented digital circuit uses reduced combinational paths and operates at a clock rate of single ADC channel, making it applicable for digitally-assisted high-speed TI-ADCs.

In this paper we propose two methods to boost the power supply rejection (PSR) of an output-capacitor-less low-dropout regulator (LDO). Our LDO is targeted for low-power system-on-chip applications, such as medical electronics, RFIDs, and IoT devices, where applied energy harvesting techniques induce large voltage ripple to supply line, thus requiring high PSR out of the LDO. The regulator utilizes a feed-forward path through the amplifier power supply rail to pass-transistor gate. Furthermore it includes a feed-forward amplifier to improve the frequency response and a feedback amplifier to stabilize the LDO, eliminating the need for an area consuming compensation capacitor. The proposed LDO is implemented in 28-nm CMOS technology. It supplies 700-mV output level with a current range of 0-5 mA and a 100-mV dropout voltage. The three amplifiers within our LDO consume only a total of 13 μA, thus regardless of increased complexity, high current efficiency of 99.74% is maintained. At the nominal load of 1 mA, low-frequency PSR reaches a value of -97 dB and at the high-frequency range of 1- 20 MHz PSR is boosted to remain below -20 dB and the region of 3-10 MHz below -30 dB.