Design of Low Power and High Speed CMOS Comparator for A/D Converter Application

Abstract

This paper presents an improved method for design of CMOS comparator based on a preamplifier-latch circuit driven by a clock. Design is intended to be implemented in Sigma-delta Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC). The main advantage of this design is capable to reduce power dissipation and increase speed of an ADC. The design is simulated in 0.18 μm CMOS Technology with Cadence environment. Proposed design exhibits good accuracy and a low power consumption about 102 μW with operating sampling frequency 125 MHz and 1.8 V supply. Simulation results are reported and compared with earlier work done and improvements are observed in this work.

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S. Yewale and R. Gamad, "Design of Low Power and High Speed CMOS Comparator for A/D Converter Application," Wireless Engineering and Technology, Vol. 3 No. 2, 2012, pp. 90-95. doi: 10.4236/wet.2012.32015.

1. Introduction

Comparator is widely used in the process of converting analog signals to digital signals. In the A/D conversion process, it is necessary to first sample the input. This sampled signal is than applied to a combination of comparators to determine the digital equivalent of the analog signal [1] and it compare the analog signal with another reference signal and outputs are binary signal based on the comparison. Low power and high speed ADCs are the main building blocks in the front-end of a radio-frequency receiver in most of the modem telecommunication systems. As the comparator is one of the block which limits the speed of the converter, its optimization is of utmost importance. The preamplifier stage amplifies the input signal to improve the comparator sensitivity and isolate the input of the comparator from switching noise coming from positive feedback stage [2]. The latch stage is used to determine which of the input signals is larger and extremely amplifies their difference. The output buffer amplifies the information from latch and outputs a digital signal [3]. The latched comparator is used for the clock signal and indicate digital output level, whether its differential input signal is positive or negative. A positive feedback mechanism to regenerate the analog input signal into a full scale digital signal is much faster and power efficient than performing multi-stage linear applications [4]. The preamplifier latch comparator [5], which combines an amplifier and a latch comparator can be obtained high speed and low power dissipation. The amplifier which is added before the latch can reduce offset voltage to obtain a high resolution. Thus, by considering factors of speed and resolution, preamplifier latch comparator are the choice for a high sped ADC [6]. This type of latched comparator was also used for high speed and low power performance [7]. Input-offset voltage is a difficult problem in comparator design. In precision applications, such as high-resolution converters, large input-offset voltages cannot be tolerated [8]. The proposed circuit topology not only achieves low power dissipation but also improves kickback noise and reduces the clock driving requirement compared with a conventional comparator. Figure 1 shows the pre-amplifier latch comparator.

2. Mathematical Analysis

Slew rate is a large-signal behavior that sets the maximum rate of output change. It is limited by the output driving capability of the comparator. The propagation

Figure 1. Preamplifier-latch comparator.

delay is inversely proportional to the input voltage applied. This means that applying a larger input voltage will improve the propagation delay, up to the limits set by the slew rate [9].The most important dynamic parameters that determine the speed of a comparator are the propagation delay and the settling time. If the propagation delay time is determined by the slew rate of the comparator, then this time can be calculated as [10]:

(1)

wheretp or ∆T = propagation delay

∆V = Change of the voltage at the output of the comparator SR = Slew rate VOH = Upper limit of the comparator VOL = Lower limit of the comparator If a square pulse is applied to the input of the comparator with a period T and frequency f, the average amount of current that the comparator must pull from VDD, recalling the current is being supplied from VDD only when p-channel is on. Notice that the power dissipation is a function of the clock frequency. A great deal of effort is put in to reducing the power dissipation of CMOS circuits. One of the major advantages of dynamic logic is its power dissipation [11]. Switched capacitor based comparator provides good accuracy of time constants but suffers from clock feed through and requires non-overlapping clock [12]. Approximately 180˚ out of phase two clock signals can be used to control amplification and reset of latch [13]. The proposed topology uses only one control signal to control both the operations as amplification and reset of latch.

2.1. Sampling Frequency

The sampling frequency “fsampling” is defined as the reciprocal of the time interval T, as [14]:

(2)

The sampling frequency has to be equal or greater than twice of the frequency bandwidth of analog signals.

2.2. Power Dissipation

Dynamic comparator power dissipation resembles that of digital gates, which have a power dissipation given approximately by [15]:

(3)

wheref is the output frequency, VDD is the supply voltage, and C is the output capacitance.

3. Proposed Design

The proposed preamplifier consists of transistors M0 to M4. Since the input differential pair uses NMOS transistors M0 & M1, while the load transistor uses PMOS transistors M2 & M3, the gain of this preamplifier easily reach an acceptable value with small size of input differential pair. The Latch is the most sensitive part in the comparator design. It consists of two inverters connected back to back with each other forming a differential comparator and an NMOS transistor is connected between the two differential nodes of the latch. The schematic of latch consist of transistors M5 to M13 which includes cross coupled inverter pair M5-M6 & M7-M8 and the charge imbalance circuitry M9-M11. Transistors M5-M8 forms the main regenerative loop for the latch. For least capacitive effects, width and lengths of transistors M5-M8 are kept minimum and W/L ratio is kept as for an ideal inverter. Sizes are further optimized to set the metastable trip point of the inverter to half of the supply voltage. The switching transistor M11 short circuits the latch’s differential nodes to a common DC level. An advantage of increasing its width is that it brings the DC level on both nodes close to each other. Transistors M9-M10 are used to avoid the clock feed through and kickback effects from the latch to the input. Width of these transistors also affects the performance of the latch. If the width is increased, it adds to the equivalent capacitance on the nodes of the latch and increases the effect of clock feed through on the input; resulting in degradation in sensitivity of the latch. If the width is decreased, then input signal has to be increased otherwise charge imbalance on the latch is not properly created. The latch operates in two phases; reset and regeneration. In the Reset phase, the charge imbalance is created on the differential nodes of the latch proportional to the variation in the input signal. In regeneration mode, the voltage imbalance on the nodes is amplified to the rail-to-rail digital levels by the NMOS and PMOS regeneration loops.

When clk goes high, the amplifier is disabled and the latch is being to amplify the difference obtained at its input transistors M12-M13 to generate logic levels at the output. Figure 2 shows the schematic view of the proposed comparator design. In the design we have used 4 transistors (two NMOS-PMOS pair) in the inverter combination. This combination reduces the parasitic capacitance and hence high comparison speed can be achieved. During the reset phase, the switching transistor short circuits the latch’s outputs and the output of that point is approximately equal to 1/2 power supply. The advantage for this characteristic is that in the second phase the regenerative loop can easily shift the output to the corresponding digital levels as determined by the charge imbalance. This also increases the speed and performance of the comparator.

4. Simulation Results and Discussions

Simulation of reported design is done using the 0.18 μm CMOS technology. In this design, we have used 1.8 V supply voltage for operation and clock period was 8ns. During the process, speed of the comparator was 125 MS/sec. This design can be used where low power, high speed and low propagation delay are the main parameters. Simulation results of the Preamplifier are presented in Figure 3 which shows a DC gain of 19.5 dB. Figure 4 shows the ac response of Latch, when modeled as an inverter and the results are obtained as DC gain of 45 dB, unity gain frequency of 116.9 MHz. Finally simulation

Figure 2. Schematic view of proposed comparator.

Figure 3. Gain response of preamplifier.

Figure 4. Gain response of Latch.

Figure 5. Results of a proposed design.

results of the comparator are given in Figure 5, when a differential sinusoidal signal is applied as an input to the latched comparator. The output here also changes its orientation depending upon the input. In addition we have also reported the results of power dissipation in Figure 6. Table 1 shows the comparison of present re-

Figure 6. Result for power dissipation.

Table 1. Comparison of present results with earlier reported work.

sults with earlier reported work and got improvement in this result.

5. Conclusion

This paper reports a CMOS comparator design and its simulation results for high speed and low power consumption. Present design is based on pre amplifier regeneration circuit and a latch. This comparator is designed for high resolution sigma delta ADCs. Simulation results are obtained with ±1.8 V power supply. We achieved the high sampling frequency of 125 MHz and low power consumption about 102 μW as compare to earlier reported work. Present results are compared and improvement is observed as shown in Table 1.

6. Acknowledgements

This work has been carried out in SMDP VLSI laboratory of the Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering Department of Shri G S Institute of Technology and Science, Indore, India. This SMDP VLSI project is funded by Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, Government of India. Authors are thankful to the Ministry for facilities provided under this project.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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