IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMSI: REGULAR PAPERS, VOL. 59, NO.

9, SEPTEMBER 2012 1829

Device Noise in Continuous-Time
Oversampling Converters
Radha S. Rajan and Shanthi Pavan, Member, IEEE
AbstractWe analyze the in-band thermal noise of continuous-
time delta sigma modulators. The manifestation of noise in con-
verters with time-invariant loop lters is straight forward and well
known. However, several practically useful modulators, like those
with switched-capacitor-resistor (SCR) and return-to-open (RTO)
feedback DACs, have a time-varying looplter. We give a frame-
work for analyzing the noise performance of such designs, and
show that it is important to consider the aliasing of noise from
around multiples of the sampling frequency. Our results compare
well with those obtained from a circuit simulator.
Index TermsAliasing, continuous time, modulator, noise anal-
ysis, NRZ, oversampling, return to open, sigma-delta, switched ca-
pacitor, time varying.
I. INTRODUCTION
C
ONTINUOUS-TIME modulators (CTDSM) have re-
ceived signicant attention recently due to several attrac-
tive features. They are capable of higher speed (or lower power)
operation when compared to their discrete-time counterparts.
They offer a resistive input impedance, thereby simplifying the
design of the driver circuitry. If properly designed, they offer
implicit anti-aliasing, obviating the need for a separate lter pre-
ceding the converter. The block diagram of a CTDSM is shown
in Fig. 1. It consists of a loop lter, whose output is sampled,
quantized and fed back through a DAC. The pulse shape of the
DAC is denoted by .
Fig. 2 shows the input stage of a typical CTDSM. For im-
proved linearity and low noise, the rst integrator is realized
using active-RC techniques. Several ways of implementing the
feedback DAC, along with their respective pulse shapes are
given. The quantizer output is assumed to be held for a
full clock period. and are non-overlapping phases, each
lasting half a clock cycle.
Fig. 2(a) shows a non-return-to-zero (NRZ) DAC. Assuming
an ideal opamp, the DAC current is seen to be . As de-
scribed elsewhere, the modulator performance is degraded by
clock jitter [1], [2], [3]. Another issue with an NRZ DAC is
the nonlinearity due to inter-symbol interference (ISI) caused by
rise/fall time asymmetry. One way of addressing these problems
Manuscript received July 02, 2011; revised September 28, 2011; accepted
November 18, 2011. Date of publication February 03, 2012; date of current ver-
sion August 24, 2012. This work was supported by the Department of Science
and Technology, Government of India through the Swarnajayanthi Fellowship.
This paper was recommended by Associate Editor Maurits Ortmanns.
The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, In-
dian Institute of Technology, Madras, Chennai 600036, India (e-mail:
shanthi@ee.iitm.ac.in).
Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TCSI.2011.2180445
Fig. 1. Block diagram of a CTDSM.
Fig. 2. Input stage of a typical CTDSM, with several realizations of the feed-
back DAC. (a) NRZ DAC. (b) SCR DAC. (c) RZ DAC. (d) RTO DAC. The
pulse shapes are shown at the right.
is to use a switched-capacitor-resistor (SCR) DAC[4], as shown
in Fig. 2(b). Here, assuming the opamp is ideal, the DAC injects
an exponentially decaying current pulse into the looplter. The
peak current and the time-constant of the decaying exponential
are controlled by . Several high performance CTDSMs with
such DACs have been reported over the years [5][9].
The return-to-zero (RZ) DAC [Fig. 2(c)] is an attempt to mit-
igate the ISI problems due to rise-fall asymmetry of an NRZ
pulse [10]. The DAC current is for half a clock cycle,
and zero for the rest of the clock period. An alternate way of
achieving an RZ pulse shape is the so-called return-to-open
(RTO) structure [Fig. 2(d)], where the feedback path is opened
for the second half of the clock period [11].
1549-8328/$31.00 2012 IEEE
1830 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMSI: REGULAR PAPERS, VOL. 59, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2012
In practice, the opamp is nonideal. This causes the four
modulator structures to fall into two fundamentally different
categorieswhile the loop lter remains time-invariant
with NRZ and RZ feedback DACs, it becomes periodically
time-varying in the SCR and RTO cases. This time-varying
nature of the loop lter causes several departures from what one
expects of a CTDSM. For instance, the implicit anti-aliasing
property, which is usually taken for granted and is cited as a
prime advantage of a continuous-time design, is lost (as shown
in [12] and [13]). Another consequence of a time-varying
loop lter is aliasing of noise from out-of-band frequencies.
Apart from its theoretical importance, it is practically relevant
due to the following. In power-efcient CTDSM designs,
the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is predominantly determined
by thermal noise, with the in-band quantization noise power
designed to be 1020 dB smaller than the thermal component
[2]. It is thus seen that an accurate analysis of thermal noise is
key to reducing power dissipation for a desired performance.
Analysis of noise in CTDSMs with NRZ and RZ feedback
DACs is straightforward. It is less so for modulators with time-
varying looplters, since the noise at a discrete-time frequency
consists of components aliased from frequencies of
the form , where denotes the sampling frequency
and is an integer. Surprisingly, there appears to be very little
work in this direction in the open literature. The authors of [14]
analyze the noise of a CTDSM with an SC feedback DAC
however, the opamp is assumed to be ideal and its noise contri-
bution is neglected.
The aim of this paper is to understand and develop intuition
about device noise in CTDSMs with time-varying loop lters.
Though the analysis of noise in time-varying networks is well
known, a CTDSM is somewhat different in the sense that the in-
puts are continuous-time, while the output is a discrete-time se-
quence. We showthat in such cases, the in-band thermal noise is
increased due to aliasing effects. We observe that the discharge
time-constant of the SCR DAC has an important bearing on the
noise performance of the modulator. Further, we see that OTAs
with same low frequency input referred noise need not result in
the same in-band noise for the modulator. The rest of this paper
is organized as follows. In Section II, we give an intuitive un-
derstanding of noise in rst order CTDSMs with NRZ and SCR
feedback DACs. We review noise in a two-phase linear peri-
odically time varying network in Section III. This also helps to
establish notation used in the rest of the paper. In Section IV, we
develop a linear model of a CTDSM with an SCR DAC, which
is appropriate for noise analysis. In Section V, noise in CTDSMs
with SCR DACs is analyzed, and the results are compared with
those fromperiodic and transient noise analysis in a commercial
circuit simulator. Design intuition is given. Noise in CTDSMs
with RTO DACs is analyzed in Section VI. Section VII con-
cludes the paper.
II. INTUITIVE UNDERSTANDING OF NOISE IN CTDSMS WITH
NRZ AND SCR DACS
To better understand the fundamental differences between
noise in CTDSMs with NRZ and SC DACs, consider the rst
order modulators shown in Fig. 3(a) and (b). As per usual prac-
tice, quantization noise is assumed to be additive. Since we
Fig. 3. Evaluating the transfer function at fromthe OTAnoise source to
the output in a rst order CTDSMwith (a) an NRZ DACand (b) an SC-DAC. (c)
Thevenin equivalent of the virtual ground node, as seen by the feedback DAC.
are interested in the in-band thermal noise, the quantizer is re-
moved. The sampling frequency is , and the desired noise
transfer function (NTF) is assumed to be . The inte-
grating capacitors are chosen assuming an ideal OTA. The feed-
back conductance (capacitance) in the NRZ (SC) case is chosen
so that the DC gain is unity. and denote the conductance of
the input resistor and transconductance of the OTArespectively.
In a well-designed modulator, . The modulator output
sequence is . We now determine when a sinusoidal cur-
rent with frequency is injected at the output of the OTA
(i.e., ). For both modulators, the output
sequence must be constant, since the injected current is at the
sampling frequency. Further, the DC current in the integrating
capacitances must be zero in both cases.
For the modulator with the NRZ DAC, the average of the
virtual ground voltage must be zero, since and are zero.
This in turn means that . Applying KCL to node Xat DC,
we see that must be zero. This can only be achieved if
. We thus see that injecting a current at (which is a frequency
that can potentially alias into the signal band) has no effect on
the CTDSM output. A similar reasoning holds for frequencies
at multiples of the sampling frequency, and for a higher order
modulator. This leads us to conclude that in a CTDSM with an
NRZ DAC, the transfer function from the OTA noise current to
the output has nulls at multiples of the sampling frequency. Such
a modulator is a linear time varying system (assuming additive
quantization noise) even though the loop lter is time-invariant.
This is due to the ZOH embedded in the network. In a general
linear time-varying network, it is well known that the output
noise at a certain frequency consists of contributions from
all frequencies of the form , where is an integer. In a
CTDSM with an NRZ DAC, OTA noise from multiples of
folds down to DCbut the gain of these folded components
RAJAN AND PAVAN: DEVICE NOISE IN CONTINUOUS-TIME OVERSAMPLING CONVERTERS 1831
is zero, thanks to the nulls of the transfer function from the OTA
noise current to at multiples of . Thus, for the CTDSM of
Fig. 3(a), which is a time-varying network, the output noise of
the modulator (due to the OTA) at low frequencies consists of
contributions from only low frequency noise components of the
OTA. Similar conclusions can be drawn with respect to noise
from the input and DAC resistors.
The situation is quite different when a SC DAC is used
[Fig. 3(b)]. When is a sinusoidal current at , has to be
zero in one clock cycle, like in the NRZ case. during
. During , the DAC capacitor (which has been charged to
during ) is connected to the virtual ground node (X).
The Thevenin equivalent looking into X is shown in Fig. 3(c),
where the open-circuit voltage waveform is shown in
grey. At the beginning of , there is a glitch on due to
the voltage on the capacitor. However, since ,
the DAC capacitor gets charged to (very nearly) the Thevenin
voltage at the end of . The average DAC current
is given by
(1)
Since has to be zero, it follows that
(2)
Thus, the transfer function from to in a modulator with an
SC DAC is non-zero at multiples of . This means that OTA
noise from around multiples of will alias to in-band frequen-
cies with a non-zero gain (unlike in the NRZ case, where the
gain for these aliased components was zero). Similar analysis
holds for noise from the input resistor. Another consequence of
the discussion above is that OTAs with the same input referred
noise at low frequencies, but different noise at high frequencies
will not necessarily result in same in-band thermal noise. This
is another departure from what one observes in the NRZ case.
Similar intuition can be developed for a CTDSM with an RTO
DAC. It is thus seen that when SCR or RTO feedback DACs are
used, one needs to determine the transfer function from every
noise source to the output at multiples of , to accurately es-
timate the in-band thermal noise. A rigorous framework to do
this is given in the next section.
III. REVIEW OF NOISE IN LINEAR TIME VARYING NETWORKS
CTDSMs are examples of linear time varying networks op-
erating in two phases, denoted by and . In each of these
phases, the networks are time invariant. In this section, we re-
view noise in such networks. We assume that there are noise
sources. Before addressing noise, it is instructive to understand
the response of such a network to a vector complex exponential
input of the form , where denotes complex frequency
( is an column vector). The analysis proceeds along the
lines of [15]. Fig. 4 shows the state and timing diagram for the
system. The state matrices in phases and are denoted by
and respectively. is the
output. Without loss of generality, we assume that the sampling
period is 1 s. Further, the two phases are assumed to be of equal
durations . The state vectors at the beginning and end
Fig. 4. State and timing diagram for a linear network operating with two
phases.
of in the th clock cycle are denoted by and
respectively. A similar notation is used for the states during .
At the switching instants the states are related by the linear trans-
formations
The output of a CTDSM is a discrete-time sequence. The phases
are assumed to be chosen such that the modulator output de-
pends on the state vector at the end of . We now
attempt to relate to and . The zero-input
response is easily seen to be
(3)
Straightforward analysis yields the zero-state response to be of
the form
where
(4)
From (3) and (4), we obtain
(5)
which yields the following steady state solution for
The output is given by
(6)
is an vector, whose th element is the transfer function
fromthe th source to the output. From(6), it is apparent that the
component of the output signal at a discrete-time frequency
has contributions from all (continuous-time) frequencies of the
form , where is an integer (recall that the sampling
rate is assumed to be 1 Hz).
1832 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMSI: REGULAR PAPERS, VOL. 59, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2012
Fig. 5. The noise spectral density of at is the result of contributions
from all continuous-time frequencies apart.
In the context of noise analysis, this means that
(7)
where denotes the contribution (at ) of the th noise
source to the output spectral density. denotes the noise spec-
tral density of the th noise source. In this work, we assume
independent noise sources. Due to the time varying nature of
the network (Fig. 5), noise from out-of-band frequencies aliases
into the signal band. In a low-pass CTDSM, it is thus seen that
the magnitude of around multiples of the sampling rate is of
special interest, as noise from these frequencies will result in
increased in-band thermal noise.
IV. MODELING CTDSMS WITH SCR DACS
FOR NOISE ANALYSIS
Modeling a practical CTDSM in a manner that enables a re-
alistic estimation of thermal noise requires the appreciation of a
few ne points, explained with the help of Fig. 6. Part (a) of the
gure shows a fully differential SCRDACdriven by a single-bit
quantizer, whose inputs are the differential outputs of the loop
lter (denoted by and ). The quantizer slices
at the falling edge of , where as usual, and are non-over-
lapping clocks with a duty cycle of 50%. The sampling rate is
. The capacitors in the SCRDAC are charged to the refer-
ences during . At the end of , the voltages on these capaci-
tors consist of two componentsthe reference voltages ,
and thermal noise (due the resistance of the switches) with vari-
ance . During , the capacitors are discharged into the
input terminals of the rst opamp ( or ) of the modu-
lator depending on the quantizer decision D ( , assumed to be
available at the beginning of ).
We now attempt to determine a single-ended circuit that
models this behavior. Since we are only concerned with
thermal noise, quantization effects should be ignored. It is
tempting to model the SCR DAC as shown in Fig. 6(b). Here,
the single-ended output of the loop lter is directly sampled on
to at the falling edge of , thereby eliminating quantization
noise. The noise current of the conductance of the sampling
switch causes a noise charge to be stored on at the
end of . In , is connected to the OTA virtual ground
through . This model for the CTDSM is erroneous due to the
following. A key point is to observe that in a linear model of a
practical modulator, the voltage across the DAC capacitor at
the end of should be exactly equal to the loop lter output
at the falling edge of . Sadly, this is not the case
Fig. 6. (a) A quantizer driving a fully differential SCR DAC. (b) An incorrect
linear, single-ended model of the DAC. (c) A single-ended model of the DAC
correctly modeling switch noise. (d) A linear model of a rst order CTDSM
with to account for the noise from the sampling switch in .
with the model of Fig. 6(b), since the voltage sampled on is a
low-pass ltered version of the loop lter output. For instance,
consider the two loop lter waveforms op1 and op2 (Fig. 6(b)),
which have the same values at the falling edge of . Ideally,
they should result in the same voltage sampled on at the end
of . This is clearly not the case with the model of Fig. 6(b).
Thus, using a nite for the switch conductance (needed to
model its noise) causes errors in the STF of the modulator at
high input frequencies (where waveform slopes are large). This
in turn results in large errors in the computed in-band thermal
noise.
The problem described above can be solved by modeling the
DAC as shown in Fig. 6(c), where the switch is assumed to be
ideal. This ensures that the voltage on at the end of is
exactly the sampled value of the loop lter at the falling edge
of . To model noise due to the switch, is added to the loop
lter output as shown in the gure. The double-sided spectral
density of , denoted by , is chosen to be
(8)
RAJAN AND PAVAN: DEVICE NOISE IN CONTINUOUS-TIME OVERSAMPLING CONVERTERS 1833
In this work, the reference is considered noiseless, but it is
straightforward to include it in (8). The model described above
can be extended to higher order modulators, and should be
used for noise computations in a circuit simulator (for running
a periodic noise analysis).
Fig. 6(d) shows the single-ended schematic of a rst order
CTDSM appropriate for computing noise. is the input con-
ductance. is the switch conductance in . All conductances
are associated with white noise currents with double sided spec-
tral densities of the form , where the symbols have their
usual meanings. The noise due to the zero-cancelling conduc-
tance in series with the integrating capacitor is neglected. The
noise current of the OTA is assumed to have a spectral density
, where denotes the excess noise factor.
To realize and , and
are both chosen to be . In this paper, we work with a nor-
malized CTDSM, where the component values are scaled so
that:
a) the desired NTF is achieved when the sampling rate is
1 Hz;
b) admittances are scaled by the number , so that the input
conductance of the modulator is 1 S.
The above objectives are achieved by dividing all conductances
and capacitances in the original circuit by and respec-
tively. All component values in the modulator are denoted by
lower case symbols, while those in the normalized design are
denoted in upper case. We thus have and
. The normalized values of and are 1 F. The dis-
cussion here onwards refers to the normalized CTDSM.
V. ANALYSIS OF NOISE IN CTDSMS WITH SCR DACS
The congurations of the normalized CTDSM during
and are shown in Fig. 7(a) and (b) respectively, where the
state variables and noise sources are marked. The state matrices
during are given by the following:
During , the corresponding matrices are
Using the matrices above in (6), the transfer function matrix
from the noise sources to the modulator output can
be evaluated. We denote the individual elements of by
. Fig. 8 shows versus frequency,
for , . The results were veried with Periodic
Transfer Function Analysis available in a commercial circuit
simulator. From the gure, it is apparent that aliasing effects
are important to accurately estimate noise. The methodology
discussed above is general, but the algebra is tedious and gives
little intuition. In the subsections below we present simplied
expressions for these transfer functions at multiples of the
sampling rate, derived using the following reasonable assump-
tions (justied in a practical CTDSM design). The approximate
values (calculated later in this section) of the transfer functions
are marked with circles at multiples of the sampling rate in
Fig. 8.
a) .
b) and are such that the DAC capacitor al-
most fully discharges during . This means that
the discharge time constant during , given by
. This implies
. In the ex-
ample of Fig. 8, the time constant during is about 0.1,
and .
c) To determine , it is necessary to determine
(see (6)). When this is evaluated at integral multi-
ples of the sampling rate, , and
. This approximation makes sense due to the following.
Fromthe discussion in Section III, recall that relates
in the th clock cycle to that in the th. In the mod-
ulator of Fig. 7, it is easily veried that .
Since , the simplication follows.
d) The in-band thermal noise spectral density is assumed to
be atthis enables us to calculate the in-band noise by
evaluating the noise spectral density at DC.
In the discussions to follow, we use to denote the spec-
tral contribution of the th noise source to output sequence .
Thus, denotes the contribution of to at . The
noise spectral density of is denoted by .
A. Input Resistor Noise
The in-band noise due to the input resistor comprises of com-
ponents that alias fromfrequencies around multiples of the sam-
pling rate. Assuming a high OSR (so that the in-band noise
spectral density can be assumed to be constant), the relative
noise contributions from various alias bands are proportional to
, for . Analysis shows that
(9)
where
and
1834 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMSI: REGULAR PAPERS, VOL. 59, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2012
Fig. 7. A normalized rst order CTDSM with an SCR DAC, showing various
noise sources. The noise due to the zero-cancelling conductance in series with
the integrating capacitor is neglected.
Fig. 8. versus frequency, for , . Their ap-
proximations at multiples of the sampling rate are shown in circles.
In practice, and
.
then simplies to
(10)
The approximate expression above is marked with circles
in Fig. 8, and is in good agreement with the exact result.
It is thus seen that the inband noise spectral density due to
the resistor noise is the result of contributions from multiple
frequencies, and not just from those around DC. This is con-
sistent with the poor alias rejection of modulators using SCR
DACs, since is proportional to the STF of the modulator.
When and are small the DAC capacitor is
not fully discharged during . A better estimate of the DC
gain of the CTDSM [12] which includes the effect of the term
is
(11)
Auseful approximation (with an error less than 5%) that enables
the closed form evaluation of the noise spectral density at low
frequencies is the following.
(12)
Using (12) with(10), the single sided noise spectral density in
the signal band can be shown to be
(13)
In the equation above, the rst term is due to resistive noise
at low frequencies, while the second is the aliased noise
from around multiples of the sampling rate. For
and , the alias components are negligible and
. The noise contribution at the output is
lesser than as the DC gain is less than 1 and tends to as
. The input referred noise, however, is approximately
.
B. DAC Noise
The DAC contributes noise through the thermal noise of the
switches in and . It can be shown that
(14)
(15)
Using (7), and the spectral densities of the respective noise
sources, the approximations relevant in a practical design
and(12), the single sided low frequency noise spectral density
due to the DAC are obtained as
(16)
(17)
The thermal noise due to the DAC (which we denote by
) is the sum of and , since and are
uncorrelated. It is thus seen that
(18)
For , , . It approaches
only as .
C. OTA Noise
The noise due to the OTA depends on . A simplied
expression when evaluated at multiples of the sampling rate can
be shown to be
(19)
RAJAN AND PAVAN: DEVICE NOISE IN CONTINUOUS-TIME OVERSAMPLING CONVERTERS 1835
where
Using the approximations valid in a practical design, we obtain
(20)
The noise spectral density of the OTA noise current is
. Using this, (20) and(12), the in-band spectral density
due to the OTA can be shown to be
(21)
For and , . If the alias
components were not considered, the OTA noise contribution
would be . It is therefore important to consider the
aliasing effects to estimate noise due to the OTA.
If is unity, the low frequency noise spectral density of the
CTDSM is given by
(22)
where is given by (11). Several observations re-
garding(22) are in order.
a) As , and if is large enough that the DAC ca-
pacitor can be assumed to completely discharge into the
OTA virtual ground, and approaches
, with equal contributions from the input resistor and
feedback DAC (whose equivalent resistance, in our nor-
malized CTDSM, is 1 ). This is an expected result.
b) In practice, is nite, and the noise spectral density due
to the DAC is smaller than (see (18)). This makes
sense due to the following. To determine the DAC noise
contribution, the OTAand input conductance are assumed
to be noiseless. In , the variance of the noise sampled
on is . At the end of , the variance of the ca-
pacitor voltage is less than , since the OTA and input
conductance are nite. This means that the single sided
noise spectral density has to be smaller than .
c) For a pure SC-DAC , and large we see that
(23)
Of this, the DAC is responsible for , while the input
resistor accounts for . The OTA is re-
sponsible for . For a CTDSM with a
resistive NRZ DAC, recall that the output noise spectral
density is . If a current steering NRZ
DAC was used instead, the corresponding noise would be
. Thus, the SC DAC does better than a
purely resistive DAC and worse than a current steering
Fig. 9. In-band noise spectral density (normalized to ) of a rst order
CTDSM with an SCR DAC as a function of . The single stage OTA has
and .
DAC. This makes sense due to the following. When a re-
sistive NRZ DAC is used, the gain for the input referred
noise voltage of the OTA is 4 during and . With a
current steering DAC, this gain becomes unity. When an
SCR DAC is employed, the gain is unity in , but higher
in thereby resulting in a noise performance lying in
between that of resistive and current steering DACs.
d) The noise contribution of the OTA depends on , re-
ducing for smaller . This makes sense due to the fol-
lowing. The noise due to the OTA is sampled on to the
feedback DAC capacitor at the end of . A smaller
leads to a better low-pass lter for this noise due to the
increased Thevenin resistance seen by . A similar ob-
servation with regard to the STF was made in [12]. The
total noise also depends on . Fig. 9 shows the in-band
noise spectral densities due various sources (normalized
to ) as a function of . For this simulation, the single
stage OTA is assumed to have and . As
increases, DAC noise tends to , while noise due
to the OTA increases. The total noise decreases with in-
creasing . The noise contributions when is varied
(for ) are shown in Fig. 10. As increases, we
see that the noise contribution of the DAC tends to .
In Figs. 9 and 10, the approximations (13), (18) and(21)
(evaluated at select values) are marked in circles.
e) For the modulator of Fig. 6(c), the in-band noise spec-
tral density is obtained by dividing (22) by (since it is
impedance scaled by ). We therefore have
(24)
D. Two Stage OTAs
The analysis has so far focused on CTDSMs using a single
stage OTA. In practice, such OTAs have limited DC gain which
1836 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMSI: REGULAR PAPERS, VOL. 59, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2012
Fig. 10. In-band noise spectral density (normalized to ) of a rst order
CTDSM with an SCR DAC as a function of . The DAC has .
For the OTA, .
Fig. 11. Macromodel of (a) a two stage feedforward compensated OTA and (b)
a two-stage Miller compensated OTA.
impacts the linearity of the modulator. This is the motivation to
use multi-stage OTAs. In this subsection, we consider two com-
monly used topologies feedforward and Miller compensated
OTAs, whose macromodels are shown in Fig. 11(a) and (b).
Fig. 12 shows the in-band spectral density of the rst order
SCR-DACbased CTDSMas a function of , when a two-stage
feedforward compensated OTA is used. For simplicity, is
assumed to be zero. It is straightforward to see that one can
then think of the two stage OTA as a single stage design with a
(complex) transconductance given by
(25)
and a single noise current source at its output with a spectral
density
(26)
Fig. 12. In-band noise spectral density (normalized to ) of a rst order
CTDSM with an SCR DAC as a function of . A two stage feedforward com-
pensated OTA is used in the integrator. , and
. The total noise spectral density and that due to the OTA are shown for
two values of .
The approximate values for the PSDcalculated using (25) and
(26) in (13), (18) and (21) are marked in circles in Fig. 12. Due
to the increased OTA transconductance at low frequencies, the
DC gain of the modulator is virtually unity, and the alias rejec-
tion is greatly improved. We should therefore expect to see the
input resistor contributing . In the case of the single-stage
OTA we saw that the DAC contributes when .
Since is greatly enhanced in a two stage OTA design, it is
reasonable that the DAC contributes , as seen in Fig. 12.
The contribution of the OTA to the total noise increases with
this is to be expected, as reasoned out for the single-stage
OTA example. Comparing Figs. 9 and 12, notice that the total
noise is different even though the low frequency input referred
noise spectral densities of the OTAs in both cases are the same.
This is due to differences in the amounts of noise aliasing to
low frequencies. We nd that the use of a feedforward OTA (in-
tended to improve linearity) results in increased thermal noise
(25%75% more, depending on ). It is also seen that using
a lower , which reduces slew rate requirements of the OTA,
thereby improving linearity, also results in lower thermal noise
(albeit at the expense of increased sensitivity to clock jitter).
When a stage Miller compensated OTA is used, the appro-
priate state matrices with the additional noise current sources
need to be used to determine inband noise spectral density.
Fig. 13 shows the in-band noise spectral density as a function
of for a Miller opamp, for two values of the compensating
capacitor. We see that the noise performance is worse than that
with a single-stage OTA (and different from that of a feedfor-
ward compensated OTA), with the OTA contribution increasing
with . Recall that CTDSMs with switched resistor/current
feedback DACs have an in-band noise spectral density that
only depends on the low frequency noise of the individual
components. It is commonly believed that this carries over
to CTDSMs with SCR DACs. However, from the discussion
above, it is apparent that the details of the OTA are important
and can inuence the in-band noise. Further, in spite of using
RAJAN AND PAVAN: DEVICE NOISE IN CONTINUOUS-TIME OVERSAMPLING CONVERTERS 1837
Fig. 13. In-band noise spectral density (normalized to ) of a rst order
CTDSM with an SCR DAC as a function of . A two stage Miller compen-
sated OTA is used in the integrator. , and . The
total noise spectral density and that due to the OTA are shown for two values of
.
a large , we see that the OTA is a signicant contributor to
the total noise.
Table I compares the noise contribution from various sources
for normalized CTDSMs with resistive NRZ and SCR DACs.
In the SCR case, the noise contributions are given for different
OTA topologies. The normalized transconductance of the rst
stage of the OTA is chosen to be 20 in all cases, with .
For the SCR DAC was chosen. The feedforward com-
pensated opamp had , , while the
Miller compensated structure used and .
The input resistor noise contribution is less than , when a
single stage OTA is used as the DC gain of the modulator is less
than 1. With a two stage OTA, it is nearly due to the in-
creased OTA transconductance. The SCR DAC noise contribu-
tion varies with opamp topology. This is because the noise con-
tribution from varies depending on the value of at the
various alias frequencies. It is seen that the OTA noise contribu-
tion is more in the SCR DAC case compared to resistive NRZ
DAC case, and the aliased noise components vary with OTA
topology. [12] explains how the assisted opamp technique of
[9] reduces swing at the virtual ground node of the OTA and im-
proves alias rejection. Unfortunately, the assistant currents only
attempt to modify the transfer function from the CTDSM input
to the OTA virtual ground. The transfer functions from the var-
ious noise sources remain unchanged. Thus, the assisted opamp
technique cannot improve the noise performance of a system
even if the assistant currents were noiseless.
E. Comparison With Transient Noise Analysis
The results presented in Sections V-AV-D were derived
from linear considerations, and veried with Periodic Noise
Analysis offered by a commercial circuit simulator. In reality, a
CTDSM is a nonlinear system due to the quantizer in the loop.
To validate our theory in the presence of quantization noise,
transient noise simulations were run for a third order single-bit
TABLE I
LOW FREQUENCY NOISE SPECTRAL DENSITY (NORMALIZED TO ) IN
NORMALIZED CTDSMS WITH RESISTIVE NRZ AND SCR DACS, FOR SEVERAL
OTA TOPOLOGIES. IN ALL CASES, AND . FOR THE SCR
DAC, .
Fig. 14. Single-ended equivalent of a third order single-bit CTDSM employing
an SCR DAC.
CTDSM employing an SCR DAC. The single-ended equivalent
of the converter is shown in Fig. 14. The sampling rate and
signal bandwidth were 6.144 MHz and 24 kHz respectively.
The rst opamp was a two stage feedforward compensated
structure, with , as shown in the lower part of the gure.
The rest of the opamps were assumed to be ideal and noiseless.
The in-band SNR due to quantization noise was about 107 dB,
much higher than that expected due to thermal noise.
Fig. 15 compares the simulated power spectral density (PSD)
when all thermal noise sources are included. For comparison,
the analytically estimated in-band noise spectral density is also
shown. The PSD obtained without noise sources is shown in
1838 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMSI: REGULAR PAPERS, VOL. 59, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2012
Fig. 15. PSD from a transient noise analysis of the third order CTDSM of
Fig. 14. The estimated noise oor from our analysis is also shown. The in-band
quantization noise is about 15 dB below thermal noise.
gray. Good agreement is seen between simulated and predicted
in-band SNRs, thereby conrming that the rst integrator is the
dominant source of thermal noise, and that the quantizer can be
safely bypassed for noise calculations.
VI. NOISE IN CTDSMS WITH RETURN-TO-OPEN (RTO) DACS
We now analyze the noise in a CTDSM with an RTO DAC,
where the components are chosen so that the DC gain is unity
and the NTF is when an ideal OTA is used. Fig. 16(a)
shows the normalized modulator. The equivalent circuits during
and , along with the appropriate noise sources are given
in Fig. 16(b) and (c) respectively. The state matrices during
are given by the following.
During , the corresponding matrices are
Using the above in (6) and evaluating at multiples of the sam-
pling rate, we obtain (assuming )
(27)
Fig. 16. (a) A normalized rst order CTDSM using an RTO DAC. (b), (c)
Equivalent circuits in and . The noise currents from the input resistor
and opamp and feedback resistor are shown in gray. Noise from
the zero-cancelling conductance in series with the integrating capacitor is ne-
glected.
(28)
(29)
Fromthese equations, it is seen that the in-band noise has con-
tributions from frequencies around multiples of the sampling
rate. The noise spectral densities due to the input resistor, DAC
and OTAcan be calculated from the equations above. The series
summation
is useful during the simplication process. The noise due to the
input resistor, OTA and DAC are respectively
(30)
(31)
(32)
RAJAN AND PAVAN: DEVICE NOISE IN CONTINUOUS-TIME OVERSAMPLING CONVERTERS 1839
Fig. 17. In-band noise spectral density (normalized to ) of a rst order
CTDSM with an RTO DAC as a function of .
Due to aliasing of out-of-band noise, the in-band contribution
due to the OTA is , which is 25% higher than that
in a modulator using a resistive NRZ DAC. The output noise
at low frequencies is seen to be more than this is due
to the increased DC gain of the modulator. For instance, with
, , and
. Fig. 17 shows the various noise components
as is varied from 10 to 100. The approximate expressions
given in (30)(32) are marked in circles, and good agreement is
seen.
When a feedforward compensated opamp is used in the in-
tegrator (assuming for simplicity that ), (25) and(26)
can be used ( in the SCR case is here) in the results
derived for a single stage OTA to estimate the various noise
contributions. is almost equal to 1 due to the increased
transconductance. This makes the noise contribution from the
input resistor virtually . has no dependence on and
hence the DAC resistor noise contribution will remain . At
frequencies where is the dominant part of the
transconductance, the opamp noise contribution is similar to that
of a single stage OTA with . When becomes
the dominant transconductance, the opamp noise contribution
is similar to that of a single stage OTA with and
the noise current spectral density being .
If is dominant for the rst few aliases ,
then the opamp noise contribution is about the same as that of a
single stage OTA with .
VII. CONCLUSIONS
We presented a general framework to analyze device noise
in CTDSMs. Being time varying networks, one ought to ex-
pect aliasing of noise from frequencies around multiples of the
sampling frequency. However, these alias components are zero
when the loop lter is time-invariant, as is the case in modula-
tors with NRZ feedback DACs. When SCR or RTO DACs are
used, the time-varying nature of the loop lter causes non-neg-
ligible aliasing of out-of-band noise. Thus, OTAs with the same
lowfrequency noise performance, but different noise at high fre-
quencies will not necessarily result in the same modulator per-
formance. Further, in an SCR DAC, the time-constant of the
decaying exponential DAC pulse has a bearing on the thermal
noise, apart from the well known implications with respect to
slew rate of the rst OTA. The noise predicted by the theory
was compared with periodic and transient noise analysis in a
commercial circuit simulator, and good agreement was seen.
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Radha S. Rajan received the B.E. degree in elec-
tronics and communication engineering from the
College of Engineering, Guindy, Madras, India, in
2008. Since then, she has been working towards the
Ph.D. degree at the Indian Institute of Technology,
Madras.
Her current research is focussed on contin-
uous-time delta-sigma modulators.
1840 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMSI: REGULAR PAPERS, VOL. 59, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2012
Shanthi Pavan received the B.Tech. degree in elec-
tronics and communication engineering from the In-
dian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, in 1995
and the M.S. and Sc.D. degrees from Columbia Uni-
versity, New York, in 1997 and 1999, respectively.
From1997 to 2000, he was with Texas Instruments
in Warren, NJ, where he worked on high speed analog
lters and data converters. From 2000 to June 2002,
he worked on microwave ICs for data communica-
tion at Bigbear Networks, Sunnyvale, CA. Since July
2002, he has been with the Indian Institute of Tech-
nology, Madras, where he is now a Professor of electrical engineering. His re-
search interests are in the areas of high speed analog circuit design and signal
processing.
Dr. Pavan is the recipient of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Dar-
lington Best Paper Award (2009), the Swarnajayanthi Fellowship (from the
Government of India), the Young Faculty Recognition Award from IIT Madras
(for excellence in teaching), the Technomentor Award from the India Semicon-
ductor Association and the Young Engineer Award from the Indian National
Academy of Engineering (2006). Dr. Pavan is the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of
the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS I, REGULAR PAPERS, and
has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS
AND SYSTEMS. He currently serves on the program committee of the IEEE
International Solid-State Circuits Conference, and is a fellow of the Indian
National Academy of Engineering.