Design of a 45nm TIQ Comparator for High Speed and Low Power 4-Bit Flash ADC

The continued speed improvement of serial links and appearance of new communication technologies, such as ultra-wideband (UWB), have introduced increasing demands on the speed and power specifications of high-speed low-tomedium resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs).This paper presents the design of high speed and ultra low power comparator of a 4-bit ADC. The comparator used is Threshold Inverter Quantization (TIQ) consuming less than 145μW power with the input frequency of 1GHz and is designed using standard CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) technology. The power supply voltage is 0.7V minimum which makes this design adaptable to wide variety of System-on-Chip (SoC) applications. The complete design of ADC is clockless which reduces the electromagnetic interference and gives better modularity. The ADC is targeted for 45nm as it was the mainstream CMOS technology, at the beginning of this research. However, the circuit should be portable to smaller feature size CMOS technologies with lower supply voltages.