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Description
In space-related projects, radiation effects such as Total Ionizing Dose (TID) effects and Single Event Effects (SEEs) are the main threat to the microelectronic conponents. ADCs, which are the crucial components of the telecommunication chain, are also facing these challenges. Radiation hardening is mandatory for the assurance of function and performance for ADC, which usually brings penalties to power efficiency. This paper presents a high-performance pipelined-SAR ADC, which is designed by revealing and balancing the tradeoffs between power efficiency and radiation tolerance, achieving 80MS/s and 70.79-dB SNDR with high conversion efficiency and radiation tolerance to TID effects and SEEs. TID irradiation tests confirm that the ADC remains unaffected up to 500 krad(Si), displaying robust resilience. Notably, the ADC exhibits a limited SEE-sensitive region and swift recovery even in the occurrence of SEE events. With a total power consumption of 13.8 mW, the prototype ADC establishes a state-of-the-art Walden Figure of Merit of 60.7 fJ/conv step, yielding a comparable efficiency compared to the non-radiation-tolerant ADCs with similar specifications.
