29.2 A 235mW CT 0-3 MASH ADC achieving −167dBFS/Hz NSD with 53MHz BW

Abstract

The trend for ADCs in wireless communication infrastructure is increased bandwidth with little or no relaxation in noise density or power consumption. The historical expectation of system designers is a noise spectral density (NSD) of -157dBFS/Hz with a power consumption of 0.5W. This expectation is a difficult one to meet with existing ADC architectures when the system bandwidth is 100MHz as demanded by standards such as LTE-A. The 0-3 continuous-time (CT) MASH [1-2] ADC described in this paper allows a direct-conversion receiver with the requisite bandwidth to be constructed, with 10dB lower noise than established benchmarks.