Analog-to-digital converters that incorporate inherent anti-alias filtering and are easy to drive significantly simplify system design. The continuous-time pipelined (CTP) ADC is one such architecture — and it turns out to be a fundamental improvement over the conventional active filter-ADC cascade, both in power efficiency and linearity. This tutorial traces the evolution of the CTP ADC from first principles, starting with the limitations of a standalone filter+ADC chain and building up the CTP concept stage by stage. Topics covered include digital reconstruction filter estimation using on-chip thermal noise, background temperature tracking of reconstruction filters, mixed-signal DAC calibration, and handling of signals near the sampling frequency. Silicon results from prototype chips in 65 nm CMOS validate the concepts throughout.

Biography:

Shanthi Pavan is the NT Alexander Institute Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India. He received the B.Tech degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from IIT Madras in 1995, and the M.S. and Sc.D. degrees from Columbia University, New York, in 1997 and 1999 respectively. From 1997 to 2000 he was with Texas Instruments in Warren, New Jersey, working on high-speed analog filters and data converters, and from 2000 to 2002 at Bigbear Networks in Sunnyvale, California on microwave ICs for data communication. He returned to IIT Madras in July 2002, where he is now the NT Alexander Institute-Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering. He is the co-author of Circuit Analysis for Analog, Mixed-Signal, and RF Designers (IEEE Press/Wiley, 2026) and Understanding Delta-Sigma Data Converters (2nd edition, Wiley-IEEE Press, 2017), the latter of which received the Wiley-IEEE Press Professional Book Award for 2020. His research interests are in high-speed analog circuit design and signal processing, with a particular focus on continuous-time data converters. He is a fellow of the IEEE, the Indian National Academy of Engineering, and the Indian National Science Academy.