A novel flash-like all-metal-oxide semiconductor analog-to-digital converter suitable for system on chips systems

The analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) play a very important role in electronic products, radar, communication systems and signal processing, to name such a few. In this paper, a novel all-metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) flash-like analog-to-digital converter (FLADC) that consists of five stages is proposed. The design was performed using only MOS transistors, and the proposed ADC works in a way similar to the conventional flash ADC. According to the proposed ADC, there is no need for the comparators used in the conventional flash ADCs, thus resulting in a reduction in both the transistor count and the power consumption. The sound operation and the superiority of the proposed ADC compared to previous works is verified by simulation using the 0.13-μm complementary MOS (CMOS) technology with a power-supply voltage, VDD, of 1.2 V. The simulation has been conducted on a 5-bit FLADC that is built by 276 MOS transistors only which is approximately 32% of the transistor count of the corresponding conventional flash ADC and has no resistors. According to the simulation results, the proposed 5-bit FLADC consumes 3.23 mW at sampling rate of 0.5 GS/s.