Presentation by Professor Un-Ku Moon, Oregon State University: July 19, 2010

Emerging ADCs

Most analog IC designers and students are drawn to ADCs. While some ADC realizations have had a lasting impact, examples including pipelined ADCs with digital redundancy, flash ADCs with folding and interpolation, and multi-bit delta-sigma modulators with dynamic element matching, there are many more recent and emerging ADC design techniques that are receiving much attention and also gaining momentum in some areas. Many of these ideas are showered with doubts and honest criticism. However, we may also be entering a new phase where a few of these developments would help resolve the tough submicron scaling challenge that analog designers face today. This tutorial will summarize and ponder the impact of a few selective as well as random slices of these emerging ADC designs.

Professor Un-Ku Moon has been with the Oregon State University since 1998. Prior to that, he was with Bell Labs (Reading and Allentown) 1988-1989 and 1994-1998. He received a bachelor's degree from the University of Washington, a master's degree from Cornell University, and a PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His current research activities are found at https://eecs.oregonstate.edu/~moon/research/