A Timing Skew Correction Technique in Time-Interleaved ADCs Based on a DeltaSigma Digital-to-Time Converter

Abstract:
This paper reviews state-of-the-art skew correction methods in time-interleaved (TI) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and introduces a novel mixed-signal skew correction technique based on dithering the control word of a digital-totime converter (DTC), which significantly relaxes the stringent DTC resolution requirements. Simulation results of a 10 GS/s 8– bit 16-core TI-ADC reveal that the proposed technique reduces the required DTC resolution by a factor of 4x and improves the spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) by up to 10 dB with a negligible noise penalty.