Ciena Corporation
Noise-shaping enhanced gated ring oscillator based analog-to-digital converters

Abstract:

A noise-shaping enhanced (NSE) gated ring oscillator (GRO)-based ADC includes a delay which delays and feedbacks an error signal to an input of the NSE GRO-based ADC. The feedback error signal provides an order of noise-shaping and the error signal is generated at the input of the NSE GRO-based ADC from an input signal, the feedback error signal, and a front-end output. A voltage-to-time converter converts the error signal to the time domain. A GRO outputs phase signals from the time domain error signal by oscillating when the error signal is high and inhibiting oscillation otherwise. A quantization device quantizes the phase signals to generate the front-end output. A quantization extraction device determines a quantization error from the quantized phase signals. A time-to-digital converter digitizes the quantization error to generate a back-end output. An output device generates a second order noise-shaped output based on the front-end and the back-end outputs.