Histogram-based calibration method for pipeline ADCs

Measurement and calibration of an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) using a histogram-based method requires a large volume of data and a long test duration, especially for a high resolution ADC. A fast and accurate calibration method for pipelined ADCs is proposed in this research. The proposed calibration method composes histograms through the outputs of each stage and calculates error sources. The digitized outputs of a stage are influenced directly by the operation of the prior stage, so the results of the histogram provide the information of errors in the prior stage. The composed histograms reduce the required samples and thus calibration time being implemented by simple modules. For 14-bit resolution pipelined ADC, the measured maximum integral non-linearity (INL) is improved from 6.78 to 0.52 LSB, and the spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) and signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio (SNDR) are improved from 67.0 to 106.2dB and from 65.6 to 84.8dB, respectively.