This article demonstrates a digitally friendly time-based analog-to-digital converter (ADC) exploiting Dickson charge-pump (CP) as part of a voltage-to-time conversion (VTC) implemented in 28-nm CMOS. In the proposed technique, the Dickson CP generates a ramp signal that is compared with the input voltage to generate a pulse of commensurable widths, which is then fed to a D-type flip-flop (DFF)-based time-to-digital converter (TDC). The TDC is composed of CMOS DFFs and digital circuits for digital conversion without any use of analog-intensive circuits, e.g., amplifiers or current sources. Thanks to the robustness of Dickson CP characteristics, the digital outputs of the proposed ADC can be corrected through a low-complexity deterministic digital mapping with improvements of 1.5-bit in peak effective number of bits (ENOB) and 9 dB in peak signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio (SNDR) verified over three measured sample prototypes.

中文翻译：

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基于Dickson电荷泵的电压至时间转换，用于28nm CMOS中基于时间的ADC

本文演示了一种数字友好的基于时间的模数转换器（ADC），该转换器利用Dickson电荷泵（CP）作为在28nm CMOS中实现的电压-时间转换（VTC）的一部分。在提出的技术中，Dickson CP产生一个斜坡信号，该斜坡信号与输入电压进行比较以产生宽度可调节的脉冲，然后将其馈送到基于D型触发器（DFF）的时间数字转换器（TDC）。TDC由CMOS DFF和用于数字转换的数字电路组成，无需使用任何模拟密集型电路，例如放大器或电流源。得益于Dickson CP特性的鲁棒性，可以通过低复杂度确定性数字映射对提出的ADC的数字输出进行校正，改进幅度为1。