Abstract: This paper presents a pipelined current mode analog to digital converter (ADC) designed in a 0.5-μm CMOS process. Adopting the global and local bias scheme, the number of interconnect signal lines is reduced numerously, and the ADC exhibits the advantages of scalability and portability. Without using linear capacitance, this ADC can be implemented in a standard digital CMOS process; thus, it is suitable for applications in the system on one chip (SoC) design as an analogue IP. Simulations show that the proposed current mode ADC can operate in a wide supply range from 3 to 7 V and a wide quantization range from ±64 to ±256 μA. Adopting the histogram testing method, the ADC was tested in a 3.3 V supply voltage/±64 A quantization range and a 5 V supply voltage/±256 μA quantization range, respectively. The results reveal that this ADC achieves a spurious free dynamic range of 61.46 dB, DNL/INL are –0.005 to +0.027 LSB/–0.1 to +0.2 LSB, respectively, under a 5 V supply voltage with a digital error correction technique.

Key words: current mode,  analog to digital converter,  pipelined