Low power flash A/D converter with TIQ comparators for multi-standard mobile applications

The need for high speed A/D converters has increased in numerous areas such as multi-standard mobile devices and real-time data acquisition applications. The flash type A/D converter, known for its fast data conversion rate, has not been popular with these applications because of its high power consumption. Unlike typical flash type A/D converters, the Threshold Inverter Quantization (TIQ) technique enables low power consumption as well as high speed data conversion. Two power management methods, sampling frequency scaling and frequency adaptive power management, are proposed for low power TIQ A/D converters in multiple frequency band applications. Both methods apply power switching and clock gating techniques. Power consumption of the TIQ A/D converter can be reduced efficiently by the proposed methods. Average power consumption in the ADC was reduced by 44% to 99% between the frequency ranges of 52 kHz to 161.3 MHz. The results show that the TIQ A/D converter can be used in SOC designs for multi standard mobile devices with reasonable power consumption. The proposed designs are implemented and fabricated in 0.18μm CMOS technology.