Comparison of Low Power High Speed Comparator for Flash ADC

Abstract

The analog to digital converter (ADC), a bridge between digital world and analog world, plays a crucial role in the modern semiconductor industry. Among different types of ADCs, the flash ADC (also known as the direct-conversion ADC) is exceedingly fast, whose high sample rate enables many large bandwidth applications, such as optical communication, radar detection. The comparator circuit is one of the critical components of flash ADC. The characteristics, like latency, gain and power consumption, of comparators determine the overall performance of flash ADCs. This paper analyzes and compares different types of comparator architecture and suggests a high-performance design for flash ADC.