A 200MS/s 7bit time domain ring quantizer

This paper presents a new switched capacitor based ring quantizer circuit. The circuit is inspired from a ring amplifier with some important modifications to enable time based quantization instead of amplification. The proposed quantizer which is a natural extension of the ring amplifier can be employed as a multi bit quantizer in pipelined analogue-to-digital converter and delta-sigma-modulators thereby replacing conventional comparator based quantizers, hence drastically reducing the overall complexity. The proposed structure was designed and simulated in a 130 nm CMOS process. The quantizer was sampled at a clock frequency of 200 MHz (fs) and consumes 600 mu W at 1.2V power supply.