OREANDA-NEWS. April 23, 2012.Fujitsu Laboratories today announced that it has developed an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) that is 50% smaller and consumes 50% less power than conventional converters.

A typical ADC works by comparing the voltage of an external analog input signal with an internally generated reference level to convert to a digital value. Switches are required to change the reference levels, however, advancements in semiconductor process scaling have made it difficult to guarantee high-speed switching.

To overcome these issues, Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a completely new circuit design by using digital control techniques that require neither the use of a switch nor the generation of a reference voltage.

Using this design, Fujitsu Laboratories developed an ADC with 6-bit resolution and a conversion rate of 1 Giga Sample per second (GS/s) that has a die area of 0.04mm2—the world's smallest for that performance class—and that consumes 9.9mW of electricity. In addition, by using multi-channel time-interleaved operation(1) to enable high-speed operation, performance levels of several tens of GS/s can be achieved, contributing to major performance enhancements in the systems in which it is installed.

Details of this technology were published at the 2012 International Symposium on VLSI Design, Automation & Test (2012 VSLI-DAT), which was held in Taiwan from Monday, April 23.