The Continuous-Time RC-Chain ADC

An amplifier-less continuous-time analog-to-digital converter consisting of only passives, comparators, and inverters is presented. Beyond simplicity, the architecture displays significant robustness properties with respect to component variations and comparator input offsets. We give an analytical design procedure demonstrating how to parameterize the architecture to a range of signal-to-noise and bandwidth requirements and validate the procedure's accuracy with behavioral transient simulations.

A Control-Bounded Quadrature Leapfrog ADC

In this paper, the design flexibility of the control-bounded analog-to-digital converter principle is demonstrated. A band-pass analog-to-digital converter is considered as an application and case study. We show how a low-pass control-bounded analog-to-digital converter can be translated into a band-pass version where the guaranteed stability, converter bandwidth, and signal-to-noise ratio are preserved while the center frequency for conversion can be positioned freely. The proposed converter is validated with behavioral simulations on several filter orders, center frequencies, and oversampling ratios. Additionally, we consider an op-amp circuit realization where the effects of first-order op-amp non-idealities are shown. Finally, robustness against component variations is demonstrated by Monte Carlo simulations.

Quadrature Control-Bounded ADCs

In this paper, the design flexibility of the control-bounded analog-to-digital converter principle is demonstrated by considering band-pass analog-to-digital conversion. We show how a low-pass control-bounded analog-to-digital converter can be translated into a band-pass version where the guaranteed stability, converter bandwidth, and signal-to-noise ratio are preserved while the center frequency for conversion can be positioned freely. The proposed converter is validated with behavioral simulations for a variety of filter orders, notch-filter frequencies, and oversampling ratios. Finally, robustness against component variations is demonstrated by Monte Carlo simulations.

Calibrating Control-Bounded ADCs

The paper considers the calibration of control-bounded analog-to-digital converters. It is demonstrated that variations of the analog frontend can be addressed by calibrating the digital estimation filter. In simulations (both behavioral and transistor level) of a leapfrog analog frontend, the proposed calibration method restores essentially the nominal performance. Moreover, with digital-filter calibration in mind, the paper reformulates the design problem of control-bounded converters and thereby clarifies the role of sampling, desired filter shape, and nominal conversion error.

Binary Control and Digital-to-Analog Conversion Using Composite NUV Priors and Iterative Gaussian Message Passing

The paper proposes a new method to determine a binary control signal for an analog linear system such that the state, or some output, of the system follows a given target trajectory. The method can also be used for digital-to-analog conversion. The heart of the proposed method is a new binary-enforcing NUV prior (normal with unknown variance). The resulting computations, for each planning period, amount to iterating forward-backward Gaussian message passing recursions (similar to Kalman smoothing), with a complexity (per iteration) that is linear in the planning horizon. In consequence, the proposed method is not limited to a short planning horizon.