Integrate and fire circuit as an ADC replacement

We evaluate the performance of an asynchronous analog-to-digital converter known as the Integrate and Fire (I&F) circuit. The reconstruction algorithm for the sampler is presented along with the analytical results for the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the reconstructed signal. We present the power vs. SNR tradeoff, based on the measurements from the chip fabricated in AMI 0.6 µm technology. The figure-of-merit (FOM) of the I&F sampler is 0.6 pJ/conversion, which is comparable to the reported FOM for other synchronous and asynchronous ADCs, even though the I&F is implemented in a much older technology as compared to the other ADCs.

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