Signal Processing Seminar

Title:  Background Digital Calibration of High Speed Nyquist 
Analog-to-Digital Converters

Speaker:  Wenbo Liu

Date:  April 16, 2008
Time:  4:00 - 5:00 pm
Where:  2269 Beckman Institute

Abstract: As technology scales down, the trend toward performing increasing 
amounts of signal processing in digital domain creates stringent demands on 
high speed and high performance analog to digital converters (ADCs). However, 
the low power supply and process variations in deep submicron processes limit 
ADC performance. Traditional analog treatments are costly in terms of power 
consumption and silicon area; moreover, they only fix specific conversion 
architectures. The proposed equalization-based background calibration scheme 
is a systematic solution to correct ADCs’ analog non-idealities effectively and 
efficiently. It models the analog errors in the code domain and fixes them by 
employing backend digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms, so the critical 
analog path can be optimized for high conversion speed and power efficiency. 
Furthermore, this technique also solves channel mismatch problems in the ADC 
array. 

Bio:  Wenbo Liu received his bachelor's degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong 
University, China, in 2004. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Electrical 
and Computer Engineering Department at University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign (UIUC). His research interests include high speed analog-to-digital 
converter design and general digital calibration schemes for analog-to-digital 
converters.