No abstract

The demand for high resolution CMOS image sensors (CIS) is rising. Analog-to-digital converters (ADC) represent one of the major bottleneck of CIS. One of the candidates to overcome the existing limits is the column-parallel ADC. Column-parallel extended counting ADCs (EC-ADC) are able to reach high resolution thanks to their two-step conversion. However the EC-ADC area increases due to the two-step design. A solution is to use the same hardware twice to perform both steps. This paper proposes a 14-b, 100 kHz Nyquist frequency, two-step incremental Σ∆ (IΣ∆) analogto-digital converter suitable for column-parallel CIS. Several architectures with different modulator order are compared to determine the most promising one. The proposed architecture, compared to a one-step second order modulator, reduces the total oversampling ratio (OSR) from 150 to 60 to reach a resolution of 14-b. The operational transconductance amplifiers (OTA) is the most critical part in our ADCs. Its required DCgain is around 80 dB for a 120 MHz gain-bandwidth product (GBW). The ideal DNL and INL of our two-step IΣ∆ ADC are respectively +0.55/-0.6 LSB and +0.5/-0.5 LSB. This work achieves a SNDR of 89 dB when a full scale sinusoid of 100 kHz is applied.

This paper presents a 14-bit Incremental Sigma Delta (IΣ∆) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) suitable for a column wise integration in a CMOS image sensor. A two-step conversion is performed to improve the conversion speed. As the same Σ∆ modulator is used for both steps, the overall complexity is reduced. Furthermore, the use of inverter-based amplifiers instead of operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) facilitates the integration within the column pitch and decreases power consumption. The proposed ADC is designed in 0.18 µm CMOS technology. The simulation shows that for a 1.8 V voltage supply, a 20 MHz clock frequency and an oversampling ratio (OSR) of 70, the power consumption is 460 µW, achieving an SNR of 83.7 dB.