Homogeneity Enforced Calibration for Pipelined ADCs Including Nonlinear Stage Amplifiers

High-speed pipelined analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are central components in many signal processing systems. Besides a high sampling rate, linearity is a key performance criterion for ADCs. The ADC’s linearity can be drastically increased with calibration techniques, which are heavily investigated. On this matter, the homogeneity enforced calibration (HEC) approach was recently introduced, covering gain and digital-to-analog converter (DAC) mismatches of a pipelined ADC. The HEC approach enables short calibration times, and high calibration performance without the need for a precisely known test signal. In this work, we improve the HEC approach such that nonlinear stage amplifiers are calibrated besides gain and DAC mismatches. The calibration performance of the improved HEC approach is verified with behavioral simulations and shows a high spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) improvement of 42.7dB and a low remaining integral nonlinearity (INL).