Blind timing error estimation based on the phasic relationship between nonoverlapping frequency points in time-interleaved ADCS

Abstract

A time-interleaved analog-to-digital converter (TIADC) system is a good option to significantly increase the sampling rate of an ADC. However, the performance of a TIADC suffers from mismatch errors among the sub-channels, especially the timing error. This paper presents a method to estimate the channel timing error by using the output data from TIADC and its corresponding reference channel. The proposed method introduces an estimate model based on the phase relationship at the non-overlapping frequency points. The only assumption we need is that the spectrum of input signal is sparse. The simulations show that the proposed method can estimate the timing error with high accuracy.