A Novel Highly Linear Voltage-To-Time Converter (VTC) Circuit for Time-Based Analog-To-Digital Converters (ADC) Using Body Biasing

Time-based analog-to-digital converter is considered a crucial part in the design of software-defined radio receivers for its higher performance than other analog-to-digital converters in terms of operation speed, input dynamic range and power consumption. In this paper, two novel voltage-to-time converters are proposed at which the input voltage signal is connected to the body terminal of the starving transistor rather than its gate terminal. These novel converters exhibit better linearity, which is analytically proven in this paper. The maximum linearity error is reduced to 0.4%. In addition, the input dynamic range of these converters is increased to 800 mV for a supply voltage of 1.2 V by using industrial hardware-calibrated TSMC 65 nm CMOS technology. These novel designs consist of only a single inverter stage, which results in reducing the layout area and the power consumption. The overall power consumption is 18 μW for the first proposed circuit and 15 μW for the second proposed circuit. The novel converter circuits have a resolution of 5 bits and operate at a maximum clock frequency of 500 MHz.

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