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Open Access

A Survey of Voltage-Controlled-Oscillator-Based Δ⁢Σ ADCs

Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA
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Abstract

The benefits of technology scaling have fueled interest in realizing time-domain oversampling ( Δ⁢Σ) of Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs). Voltage-Controlled Oscillators (VCO) are increasingly used to design Δ⁢Σ ADCs because of their simplicity, high digitization, and low-voltage tolerance, making them a promising candidate to replace the classical Operational Transconductance Amplifier (OTA) in Δ⁢Σ ADC design. This work aims to provide a summary of the fully VCO-based Δ⁢Σ ADCs that are highly digital and scaling-friendly. This work presents a review of first-order and high-order VCO-based Δ⁢Σ ADCs with several techniques and architectures to mitigate the nonidealities introduced by VCO, achieving outstanding power efficiency. The contributions and drawbacks of these techniques and architectures are also discussed.

Keywords

Voltage-Controlled Oscillator (VCO)Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC)oversampling (ΔΣ) ADCtime-domain signal processingVCO-based ΔΣ ADC

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Tsinghua Science and Technology
Volume 27 Issue 3,
June 2022
Pages 472-480
DOI: 10.26599/TST.2021.9010037
Cite this article:
Zhong Y, Sun N. A Survey of Voltage-Controlled-Oscillator-Based Δ⁢Σ ADCs. Tsinghua Science and Technology, 2022, 27(3): 472-480. https://doi.org/10.26599/TST.2021.9010037

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Received: 27 February 2021
Revised: 14 May 2021
Accepted: 16 May 2021
Published: 13 November 2021
© The author(s) 2022

The articles published in this open access journal are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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