High speed sample and hold circuit design

Abstract

Sampling of the time-varying input signal is the first step in any type of Analog to Digital (A/D) conversion. For Low Power and high-speed A/D converter, a high-performance Sample and Hold (S/H) circuit is needed as its front-end component. In this thesis, the high speed sample and hold circuit has been designed, requiring low power as a front end block of pipeline analog to digital converter. In this work, architectures of sample and hold circuit are studied and issues which limit the performance of sample and hold circuits are discussed. A fully differential S/H circuit using bottom plate sampling is proposed. The circuit has been designed in order to meet the specification. Amplifiers are studied and folded-cascode amplifier is chosen as an optimum architecture for switch capacitor based sample and hold circuit. The proposed circuit is designed optimally in a 180 nm CMOS process, in the Cadence Spectre environment. The speed and power achieved are 125 MSPS, 6.8mW respectively.