A 3-GS/s RF Track-and-Hold Amplifier Utilizing Body-Biasing With >55-dBFS SNR and >67-dBc SFDR Up to 3 GHz in 22-nm CMOS SOI

Abstract

In this article, a 3-GS/s time-interleaved (TI) RF track-and-hold (TaH) amplifier designed in a 22-nm SOI technology is presented. The TaH amplifier is designed to drive an ADC, which can be either two pipeline-ADCs or two rows of SAR-ADCs. Both TI TaH are driven by a single RF-matched wide-band bulk-controlled front-end (FE) buffer. The measured TaH amplifier has an SFDR beyond 70 dBc up to 2.5 GHz and remains above 67 dBc till 3 GHz enabling subsampling. An overall system bandwidth of 4.5 GHz is achieved with an SNR above 55 dBFS. The ultralow-jitter clock regeneration has only 45 fs rms jitter not limiting the SNR up to 3 GHz. Two-tone and multitone measurements reveal a third intermodulation and interband nonlinearity with >72 and >82 dBFS, respectively. Off-chip calibration of offset/gain mismatch and time-skew between both TaH-lanes reduce interleaving spurs >75 dBFS utilizing a 37-tap fractional delay FIR filter. The efficient body-bias control of the technology is used to dynamically body-bias the TaH sample-switch increasing bandwidth by 10% improving settling performance while at the same time the leakage decreases. Static body-biasing is also applied to the common-mode feedback by using the bulk as a control node. The TaH amplifier including the clock generation consumes only 178 mW from a triple 2 V/0.9 V/−0.8 V supply.

Keywords

• Body-biasing
• common-mode feedback (CMFB)
• FD-SOI
• front-end (FE)
• RF
• time interleaving (TI)