Dissertation in the field of Electronic Circuit Design, Tero Nieminen

The title of thesis is High-performance Analog-to-Digital Converters and Line Drivers

Nowadays, a high-speed medium-accuracy analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is required in numerous applications, such as a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system, wireless local area network (WLAN) receiver, or DVD and Blu-Ray readout. As one of the two main parts, this dissertation presents the design and implementation of wideband high-speed mediumaccuracy pipeline ADC as a part of a receiver of a SAR system, implemented in a deepsubmicron CMOS process. Technology scaling of modern narrow line width CMOS processes has enabled higher bandwidths, but from dynamic range and accuracy perspectives, analog design of integrated circuits has become more challenging. This thesis presents detailed design of the critical analog circuit blocks of the pipeline ADC, covering two fabricated 130-nm 440-MS/s programmable 5-8-bit ADC prototypes for a SAR receiver. Due to their flexibility, the ADCs can be optimized for several standards in accordance with the accuracy and power. The second ADC was also measured together with the entire receiver.

Opponent: Professor Timo Rahkonen, University of Oulu, Finland

Supervisor: Professor Jussi Ryynänen, Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering, Department of Micro- and Nanosciences