Weak Nonlinearities in Active Filters and Continuous-Time Pipeline ADCs

The continuous-time pipeline(CTP) ADC is an emerging architecture that realizes the equivalent of an anti-alias filter followed by a Nyquist-rate ADC. This work analyzes the effect of weak amplifier nonlinearities on the performance of a filter+ADC chain and compares it with that of an equivalent CTP. For a given power dissipation and noise, we show that an appropriately designed CTP is more linear when compared to a filter+ADC cascade. Our theory is verified using macro-model and transistor-level simulations.