Analysis & Design of low Power Dynamic Latched Double-Tail Comparator

IJSTE - International Journal of Science Technology & Engineering Volume 2 Issue 11 May 2016 ISSN (online): 2349-784X Analysis & Design of low Power Dynamic Latched Double-Tail Comparator Manish Kumar Kapil Sachdeva Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering Indus Institute of Engineering and Technology, Kinana, Jind, Indus Institute of Engineering and Technology, Kinana, Jind, Haryana, India - 126102 Haryana, India - 126102 Abstract The need for low power, high speed Analog-To-Digital converters is pushing towards the use of dynamic comparator to maximize speed &power efficiency. In this paper, we designed a Dynamic Latched Double-Tail Comparator which is used in implementation of many ADC s. An analysis on the delay of the comparator will presented. Simulation results in 0.18um CMOS technology confirm the analysis results. The main idea of this Dynamic Latched Comparator is to reduce the static power consumption by completely cutoff the leakage current to ground. For this purpose, the Power Gating technique is used. The frequency of this comparator is 1GHz at supply voltage of 1.8V. Keywords: CMOS technology, MOSFET, Dynamic Latched Comparator I. INTRODUCTION Comparator is one of the fundamental building blocks in most analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). Many high speed ADCs, such as flash ADCs, require high-speed and low-power when the supply voltage is smaller. In other words, in a given technology, to achieve high speed, larger transistors are required to compensate the reduction of supply voltage, which also means that more die area and power is needed. Besides, low-voltage operation results in limited common-mode input range, which is important in many high-speed ADC architectures, such as flash ADC. Many techniques, such as supply boosting methods [2], [3], techniques employing body-driven transistors [4], [5], current-mode design [6] and those using dual-oxide processes, which can handle higher supply voltages have been developed to meet the low-voltage design challenges. Boosting and bootstrapping are two techniques based on augmenting the supply, reference, or clock voltage to address input-range and switching problems. These are effective techniques, but they introduce reliability issues especially in UDSM CMOS technologies. Body-driven technique adopted by Blalock [4], removes the threshold voltage requirement such that body-driven MOSFET operates as a depletion-type device. Based on this approach, in [5], a 1-bit quantizer for sub-1v modulators is proposed. Despite the advantages, the body-driven transistor suffers from smaller trans-conductance (equal to gmb of the transistor) compared to its gate-driven counterpart while special fabrication process, such as deep n-well is required to have both NMOS and PMOS transistors operate in the body-driven configuration [7],[8]. Apart from technological modifications, developing new circuit structures which avoid stacking too many transistors between the supply rails is preferable for low-voltage operation, especially if they do not increase the circuit complexity. Fig. 1: Typical block diagram of a high-speed voltage comparator In this paper, an analysis about the delay of dynamic latched comparator has been presented. Furthermore, based on the doubletail structure proposed in [9], a dynamic comparator is presented, which does not require boosted voltage or stacking of too many transistors. Merely by adding a few minimum-size transistors to the conventional double-tail dynamic comparator, latch delay time is profoundly reduced. This also results in considerable power savings when compared to the conventional dynamic comparator and double-tail comparator. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section I investigates the design of the Dynamic Latched Double-Tail Comparator. Section II describes the operation of this comparator. The results & waveform will be discussing in section III. The conclusion is described in section IV. All rights reserved by www.ijste.org 822

II. DYNAMIC LATCHED COMPARATOR Dynamic Latched comparator has found wide applications in many high-speed ADCs since they can make fast decisions due to the strong positive feedback in the regenerative latch. Recently, many analyses have been presented, which investigate the performance of these comparator from different aspects, such as noise [11], offset [12], [13], random decision errors [14] and kickback noise [15]. In this section, a delay analysis is presented. Operation of Dynamic Latched Comparator Fig. 2: Schematic diagram of dynamic latched double-tail comparator The operation of the comparator shown in Fig. 2 is as follows. During reset phase (CLK = 0, Mtail1 and Mtail2 are off, avoiding static power), M3 and M4 pulls both fn and fp nodes to VDD, hence transistor Mc1 and Mc2 are cut off. Intermediate stage transistors, MR1 and MR2, reset both latch outputs to ground. During decision-making phase (CLK = VDD, Mtail1, and Mtail2 are on), transistors M3 and M4 turn off. Furthermore, at the beginning of this phase, the control transistors are still off (since fn and fp are about VDD). Thus, fn and fp start to drop with different rates according to the input voltages. Suppose VINP > VINN, thus fn drops faster than fp, (since M2 provides more current than M1). As long as fn continues falling, the corresponding PMOS control transistor (Mc1 in this case) starts to turn on, pulling fp node back to the VDD; so another control transistor (Mc2) remains off, allowing fn to be discharged completely. In the proposed structure as soon as the comparator detects that for instance node fn discharges faster, a PMOS transistor (Mc1) turns on, pulling the other node fp back to the VDD. Therefore, by the time passing, the difference between fn and fp (Vfn/fp) increases in an exponential manner, leading to the reduction of latch regeneration time. Despite the effectiveness of the proposed idea, one of the points which should be considered is that in this circuit, when one of the control transistors (e.g., Mc1) turns on, a current from VDD is drawn to the ground via input and tail transistor (e.g., Mc1, M1, and Mtail1), resulting in static power consumption. To overcome this issue, two NMOS switches are used below the input All rights reserved by www.ijste.org 823

transistors, as shown in Fig. 2. At the beginning of the decision making phase, due to the fact that both fn and fp nodes have been pre-charged to VDD. Waveforms are shown in Fig. 3. Fig. 3: Transient simulation of dynamic latched comparator During the reset phase, both switches are closed and fn and fp start to drop with different discharging rates. As soon as the comparator detects that one of the fn/fp nodes is discharging faster, control transistors will act in a way to increase their voltage difference. Suppose that fp is pulling up to the VDD and fn should be discharged completely, hence the switch in the charging path of fp will be opened (in order to prevent any current drawn from VDD) but the other switch connected to fn will be closed to allow the complete discharge of fn node. In other words, the operation of the control transistors with the switches emulates the operation of the latch. In this proposed structure shown in Fig. 4, the power gating technique is used with domino logic. This structure supports to pull the fp node up to vdd and discharging the fn node completely. This is possible as both the switching transistor will be opened at the same time. At the same time Msw3 & Msw4 will be closed. In this structure, Power Gating Technique & use of domino logic style reduces the overall power consumption. III. RESULTS & WAVEFORM In order to analyze this dynamic latched comparator, this circuit has been simulated in 180 nm CMOS technology with 1.8V power supply at 1GHz clock frequency. Tanner EDA tool is leading provider to easy to use. PC electronic design automation (EDA) software solution for the design, layout and verification of analog-mixed signal integrated circuits. Particular care was taken in the layout to avoid affecting delay and power of the comparator. The design of this comparator has been drawn using S-Edit. The results are simulated in T-spice. The waveform is shown through W-edit which represents in Fig. 5. All rights reserved by www.ijste.org 824

Fig. 4: Schematics of proposed dynamic latched comparator Fig. 5: Waveform of proposed dynamic latched comparator All rights reserved by www.ijste.org 825

Table 1 Performance Comparison of proposed comparator with conventional comparator Parameters Conventional comparator Proposed double tail comparator Technology 180nm 180nm Supply voltage 1.8V 1.8V Power 48.5uw 18uw Delay 691ps 350ps IV. CONCLUSION In this paper, we presented a delay analysis for dynamic latched comparator. Based on theoretical analyses, dynamic comparator with low-voltage low-power capability was proposed in order to improve the performance of the comparator. Post-layout simulation results in 0.18-μm CMOS technology confirmed that the delay and power of the proposed comparator is reduced to a great extent. REFERENCES [1] B. Goll and H. Zimmermann, A 65nm CMOS comparator with modified latch to achieve 7GHz/1.3mW at 1.2V and 700MHz/47μW at 0.6V, in Proc. IEEE Int. Solid-State Circuits Conf. Dig. Tech. Papers, pp. 328 329, Feb. 2009. [2] B. Goll and H. Zimmermann, Low-power 600MHz comparator for 0.5 V supply voltage in 0.12 μm CMOS, IEEE Electron. Letter, vol. 43, no. 7, pp. 388 390, Mar. 2007. [3] D. Shinkel, E. Mensink, E. Klumperink, E. van Tuijl, and B. Nauta, A double-tail latch-type voltage sense amplifier with 18ps Setup + Hold time, in Proc. IEEE Int. Solid-State Circuits Conf., Dig. Tech. Papers, pp. 314 315, Feb. 2007. [4] P. Nuzzo, F. D. Bernardinis, P. Terreni, and G. Van der Plas, Noise analysis of regenerative comparators for reconfigurable ADC architectures, IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. I, Reg. Papers, vol. 55, no. 6, pp. 1441 1454, Jul. 2008. [5] A. Nikoozadeh and B. Murmann, An analysis of latched comparator offset due to load capacitor mismatch, IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. II, Exp. Briefs, vol. 53, no. 12, pp. 1398 1402, Dec. 2006. [6] S. Babayan-Mashhadi and R. Lotfi, An offset cancellation technique for comparators using body-voltage trimming, Int. J. Analog Integrated Circuits Signal Process., vol. 73, no. 3, pp. 673 682, Dec. 2012. [7] J. He, S. Zhan, D. Chen, and R. J. Geiger, Analyses of static and dynamic random offset voltages in dynamic comparators, IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. I, Reg. Papers, vol. 56, no. 5, pp. 911 919, May 2009. [8] J. Kim, B. S. Leibowits, J. Ren, and C. J. Madden, Simulation and analysis of random decision errors in clocked comparators, IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. I, Reg. Papers, vol. 56, no. 8, pp. 1844 1857, Aug. 2009. [9] Samaneh Babayan-Mashhadi, and Reza Lotfi, Analysis and design of low voltage low power double tail dynamic comparator IEEE Transaction on VLSI System, 2013. [10] Masaya Miyahara, Yusuke Asada, Daehwa Paik and Akira Matsuzawa, Feb., 2008., A Low-Noise Self-Calibrating Dynamic Comparator for High-Speed ADCs, ISSCC Dig. of Tech. Papers, pp.238-239, [11] Farshad Moradi, Hamid Mahmoodi, Hamid Alimohammadi, A Leakage-Tolerant CMOS Comparator in Ultra Deep Submicron CMOS Technology, Conference on design of circuits and integrated systems, pp.415-418. [12] Sunil N. Limbachiya, Priyesh.Gandhi, 2012, Low Power High Speed CMOS current Comparator in 0.18μm and 0.13μm Technology, International Journal of Advances in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Vol. 3, pp. 87-90 [13] Jing Li, Ning Ning, Ling Du, Qi Yu, and Yang Liu, Marc 2012, The Impact of Gate Leakage Current on PLL in 65 nm Technology: Analysis and Optimization, Journal of semiconductor technology and science,vol. 12, pp. 99-106. [14] B. J. Blalock, H. W. Liz P.E., Allen S.A. Jackson, 2000, Body-driving as a low-voltage analog design technique for CMOS technology, IEEE Conference Publications, pp. 113-118. [15] Chung-Hsun Huang, Jinn-Shyan Wang, February 2003, High-Performance and Power-Efficient CMOS Comparators, IEEE journal of solid-state circuits, vol. 38, pp. 254-262. All rights reserved by www.ijste.org 826