A capacitive DAC with custom 3-D 1-fF MOM unit capacitors optimized for fast-settling routing in high speed SAR ADCs

Asynchronous successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converters (ADC) feature high energy efficiency but medium performance. From the point of view of speed, the key bottleneck is the unit capacitor size. In this paper, a small size three-dimensional (3-D) metal—oxide—metal (MOM) capacitor is proposed. The unit capacitor has a capacitance of 1-fF. It shapes as an umbrella, which is designed for fast settling consideration. A comparison among the proposed capacitor with other 3-D MOM capacitors is also given in the paper. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the MOM capacitor, a 6-b capacitive DAC is implemented in TSMC 1P9M 65 nm LP CMOS technology. The DAC consumes a power dissipation of 0.16 mW at the rate of 100 MS/s, excluding a source-follower based output buffer. Static measurement result shows that INL is less than ±1 LSB and DNL is less than ±0.5 LSB. In addition, a 100 MS/s 9-bit SAR ADC with the proposed 3-D capacitor is simulated. (paper)