Power dissipation bounds for high-speed Nyquist analog-to-digital converters

Authors:
Timmy Sundström;Boris Murmann;Christer Svensson
Affiliations:
Department of Electrical Engineering, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden;Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Department of Electrical Engineering, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
Venue:
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems Part I: Regular Papers
Year:
2009

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Abstract

A very important limitation of high-speed analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is their power dissipation. ADC power dissipation has been examined several times, mostly empirically. In this paper, we present an attempt to estimate a lower bound for the power of ADCs, based on first principles and using pipeline and flash architectures as examples. We find that power dissipation of high-resolution ADCs is bound by noise, whereas technology is the limiting factor for low-resolution devices. Our model assumes the use of digital error correction, but we also study an example on the power penalty due to matching requirements. A comparison with published experimental data indicates that the best ADCs use about 50 times the estimated minimum power. Two published ADCs are used for a more detailed comparison between the minimum bound and today's designs.