The Re-Emergence of Successive Approximation as the Architecture of Choice for Integrated Analog to Digital Converters

In the early days of MOS integrated circuits (way back in the 1970’s), getting any kind of accurate analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to work was very challenging. Designers only had depletion-mode and enhancement-mode NMOS transistors to work with; and, getting even modest analog voltage gain was quite difficult. The successive approximation ADC, which does not require an amplifier of any kind, took off as a dominant ADC architecture in the early days of MOS. Then, as CMOS took hold in the 1980’s, many other ADC architectures took over and successive approximation became just one of many possible choices.

L. Richard Carley

STMicroelectronics Professor of Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University on March 29, 2010 at 8:00 AM in Monteith Research Center (MRC) 136

L. Richard Carley received an S.B. in 1976, an M.S. in 1978, and a Ph.D. in 1984, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania in 1984, and in March 2001, he became the STMicroelectronics Professor of Engineering at CMU. Dr. Carley's research interests include analog/RF integrated circuit design in deeply scaled CMOS technologies and novel nano-electro-mechanical device design and fabrication. Dr. Carley has been granted 15 patents, authored or co-authored over 120 technical papers, and authored or co-authored over 20 books and/or book chapters. He has won numerous awards including Best Technical Paper Awards at both the 1987 and the 2002 Design Automation Conference (DAC). In 1997, Dr. Carley co-founded the analog electronic design automation startup Neolinear which as sold to Cadence in 2004.

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