We present in this brief a novel multi-stage noise-shaping (MASH) 3–1 continuous-time (CT) delta-sigma modulator ( $\Delta \Sigma \text{M}$ ) with gated ring oscillator based quantizers (GROQs) in both stages of the cascade. The use of GROQs increases the linearity performance with respect to the conventional voltage controlled oscillator based quantizers (VCOQs) and allows a more robust extraction of the front-end stage quantization error in the time domain, thus making the proposed architecture more suitable to implement high-order expandable scaling-friendly MASH $\Delta \Sigma $ Ms, in which the back-end stages are implemented by mostly-digital GRO-based time-to-digital converters (TDCs). The circuit has been fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS technology with 1-V supply voltage, and it operates at 640-MHz sampling frequency to digitize 10-MHz signals. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first reported experimental validation of a GRO-based CT MASH $\Delta \Sigma \text{M}$ , featuring a 79.8-dB signal to noise ratio (SNR) at −2.2-dBFS, a 77.3-dB signal to (noise + distortion) ratio (SNDR) at −4-dBFS and a dynamic range (DR) of 81.7 dB, with a power consumption of 12-mW. These metrics demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with a DR-based Schreier FOM of 170.9 dB.

中文翻译：

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基于 10MHz BW 77.3dB SNDR 640MS/s GRO 的 CT MASH ΔΣ 调制器

我们在本简报中介绍了一种新颖的多级噪声整形 (MASH) 3-1 连续时间 (CT) Δ-Σ 调制器（ $\Delta \Sigma \text{M}$ ) 在级联的两个阶段都带有基于门控环形振荡器的量化器 (GROQ)。与传统的基于压控振荡器的量化器 (VCOQ) 相比，GROQ 的使用提高了线性性能，并允许更稳健地提取时域中的前端级量化误差，从而使所提出的架构更适合实现高-order 可扩展缩放友好 MASH $\Delta \Sigma $ Ms，其中后端阶段主要由基于数字 GRO 的时间数字转换器 (TDC) 实现。该电路采用 65-nm CMOS 技术制造，电源电压为 1-V，它以 640-MHz 采样频率运行，以数字化 10-MHz 信号。据作者所知，这是首次报道的基于 GRO 的 CT MASH 实验验证 $\Delta \Sigma \text{M}$ , 具有 -2.2-dBFS 时的 79.8-dB 信噪比 (SNR)、-4-dBFS 时的 77.3-dB 信噪比 (SNDR) 和 81.7 dB 的动态范围 (DR)，功耗为 12mW。这些指标展示了基于 DR 的 Schreier FOM 为 170.9 dB 的最先进性能。