Background calibration of non-linearity of samplers and amplifiers in adcs
AssigneeAnalog Devices, Inc.
InventorsAhmed Mohamed Abdelatty ALI, Paridhi GULATI
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Analog circuits are often non-linear, and the non-linearities can hurt performance. Designers would trade off power consumption to achieve better linearity. An efficient and effective calibration technique can address the non-linearities and reduce the overall power consumption. A dither signal injected to the analog circuit can be used to expose the non-linear behavior in the digital domain. To detect the non-linearities, a counting approach is applied to isolate non-linearities independent of the input distribution. The approach is superior to and different from other approaches in many ways.
Claims20
A method for efficient error estimation and calibration of a circuit, comprising:
- adding a dither at an input of the circuit;
- removing the dither at an output of the circuit;
- updating an estimate of a component of a circuit on a sample-by-sample basis based on a sign bit of the dither and ranges on the output defined by one or more inspection points;
- and
- calibrating the circuit based on the estimate of the component of the circuit.
A calibration system with efficient error estimation, comprising:
- dither circuitry to inject a dither at an input of a circuit and to remove the dither at an output of the circuit;
- a first operation to determine whether a corrected output of the circuit is within a first range defined by a first inspection point;
- a second operation to obtain a sign of the dither;
- a third operation to combine outputs of the first operation and the second operation;
- and
- calibration circuitry to update an estimate of a component of the circuit based on an output of the third operation.
A calibration system with efficient error estimation, comprising:
- dither circuitry to inject a dither at an input of a circuit and to remove the dither at an output of the circuit;
- error circuitry to compute partial errors at different inspection points for a given sample of the output of the circuit;
- and
- calibration circuitry to update an estimate of a component of the circuit based on the partial errors computed for successive samples of the output of the circuit.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.