Session 16 overview: Gigahertz data converters.

Circuit and architectural innovations have enabled medium and high-resolution data converters to push bandwidths beyond 1GHz. This entire session is devoted to gigahertz data converters covering resolutions up to 14b and sampling rates up to 10GS/s. The ADC papers in this session make extensive use of dynamic amplifiers and comparators, calibrations for offsets, timing, gain errors and transfer functions, and randomization techniques. An oversampled continuous-time pipeline ADC architecture combines the wide bandwidth of a pipeline ADC with the antialiasing properties of a continuous-time oversampling converter. The DAC papers employ mixing techniques in the analog or digital domains for direct up-conversion up to 21GHz.