Digital calibration techniques for pipelined ADCs

Abstract

This paper describes a technique for background digital multistage calibration in the removal of nonlinearities caused by design limitations in pipelined analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). Foreground initialization reduces the calibration time. Furthermore, an improved background skip-and-fill method enables the ADC to trace environmental changes. This method uses a least mean square adaptive algorithm that is digitally implemented with a significantly reduced number of tap coefficients.