An Empirical Study Of The Settling Performance Of Ring Amplifiers For Pipelined Adcs

This work presents a design example of how ring amplifier settling differs from a traditional operational amplifier. Ringamps posses dynamic bandwidth characteristics when amplifying discrete-time waveforms. The dynamic bandwidth of ringamps is demonstrated with transistor level simulations in an 180 CMOS process. That experiment shows increased performance when used in low feedback factors compared to operational amplifiers. This work includes a discussion on how the settling performance of ringamps affects system level analog-to-digital converter design.