A wideband cascaded sigma-delta modulator with improved nonlinearity effects

This work presents a wideband cascaded sigma-delta modulator (CLFSDM) that reduces the nonlinearity effects of components. This architecture offers a new noise-shaping function to achieve high resolution in wideband applications and reduce digital-analogue converter (DAC) mismatch from the multi-bit feedback. Moreover, the error cancellation schemes can be added in the digital circuit part to cancel the coarse quantization errors and thus effectively reduce the non-ideal effects such as DAC mismatch. The mismatches between the two stages, such as in the gain error and pole error, may seriously degrade performance. The blind on-line calibration technique is used to eliminate these imperfect analogue circuit errors in the digital circuit. Accordingly, this architecture can reduce the over sampling ratio (OSR), and the in-band noise can be significantly suppressed to achieve a high resolution in Matlab and Switcap2 simulations. Simulation results indicate this sigma-delta modulator is very efficient in wide bandwidth applications.