Low Power Analog to Digital Converter

Dear Colleagues,

Low power devices are crucial to the Internet of Things (IoT), with more than 9 billion connected IoT devices in use at the end of 2017. In wearable devices and other IoT applications, integrated sensor interface circuits are required to prepare the analog sensor output for digital signal processing. Often the sensor nodes are powered by batteries, and hence power dissipation in the interface circuitry is of great concern. The interfaces usually require high-accuracy ultra-low-power analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). While many design techniques use energy efficient SAR architectures, where possible for moderate resolution and speed, higher resolution is consistently enabled by delta-sigma architecture and faster operation is realized by pipeline architecture. Precision is further enabled by techniques, such as hardware re-use, calibration, dynamic element matching, chopping, and correlated double-sampling.

Now, the focus of research on low-power ADC design itself, however, has shifted to the hybrid of architectures and sophisticated calibration methods. The main reason for this shift is further reduction of power consumption as well as high speed. Power, linearity, bandwidth, area, and process form complex trade-offs in ADC design. Circuit nonlinearity, process variation and mismatch between activate and passive devices are a few examples of challenges in today’s ADCs, which, if not carefully accounted for, could lead to gain error and/or nonlinearity in the ADC system. These issues can be resolved in the analog or digital domain. Analog-domain solutions for the above issues include using larger capacitors for better matching or using high loop gain, wide bandwidth, and low-distortion amplifiers or using feedback loops. Unfortunately, all the above techniques are power-hungry and becoming increasingly difficult to design with deep submicron or nano-micrometer CMOS processes. On the other hand, reduced gate delays and ease of portability across processes make digital calibration for analog imperfections very attractive in modern CMOS processes. Most of the existing calibration techniques try to account for linear gain errors. However, there are only a handful of digital calibration techniques which can help reduce nonlinearity in ADCs.

In this special issue, we focus on the latest development in low power ADCs. It will reflect a wide spectrum of research topics from architecture design, analog/digital module design and calibration algorithm design. Authors are invited to submit regular papers following the Journal of Low Power Electronics and Applications submission guidelines. Suggested topics include but are not limited to:

• Nyquist rate ADCs
• Oversampling ADCs
• Hybrid architecture for ADCs
• Power efficient linearity and SNR enhancement techniques
• Foreground/background calibration algorithm
• Low power key modules for ADCs
• Emerging technology ADCs

Prof. Jiann-Shiun Yuan
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journal of Low Power Electronics and Applications is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.