The increasingly stringent requirements of today's communication systems and portable devices are imposing two challenges on the design of Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADC) and delta-sigma modulators (DeltaSigmaM) architecture in particular.;The first is the extension of the input frequency range to include applications where the input bandwidth exceeds the 1 MHz range.;This challenge in extending the operational speed of DeltaSigmaM is further rendered more complicated by the ever shrinking transistor dimension. As predicted by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) Roadmap for CMOS technology, the transistor dimension will reach 0.05 mum in 2011. With this dramatic shrink in the transistor length, and as a result in the supply voltage, device modelling becomes ambiguous and circuit non-idealities more pronounced. The design of the main analog building blocks that minimize the time-to-market is therefore becoming very complicated.;These two issues will be addressed in this thesis, namely a new design method that will minimize the design cycle of delta-sigma analog-to-digital converters (DeltaSigma ADCs) intended for high-speed applications. This method will be demonstrated efficient in the implementation of two state-of-the-art modulators in terms of performance using a widely adopted figure of merit.;The validity of the top-down design methodology was verified through the fabrication of two prototype integrated circuits (ICs), both in TSMC 0.18 mum CMOS technology. In the first chip, a single-bit, fourth-order DeltaSigma ADC was implemented achieving more than 12-bit resolution. The second chip further validated the methodology to include higher resolution, in the range of 13 bits, multi-bit DeltaSigma ADCs. The experimental results from both prototype ICs closely mimic the system-level behavior of the designed modulator.
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