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CDS Circuit with High-Performance VGA Functionality and Its Design Procedure

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Abstract

In order to process charge-coupled-device (CCD) signals, a correlated double sampling (CDS) circuit is necessary for noise elimination. Furthermore, in order to amplify the CCD signals to proper amplitude, an extra variable-gain amplifier (VGA) circuit is also necessary for providing gain. In traditional works, for conciseness and efficiency, those separated CDS and VGA circuits are combined together into a single circuit. However, such a CDS circuit with embedded VGA can provide only several different gain values and 12-bit sampling resolution at most, which cannot meet the increasing demands from the users. Hence, for this reason, a new CDS circuit with embedded VGA has been proposed in this paper. This new CDS circuit has five advantages: high resolution of VGA-gain programming (512 different gain values), wide span of VGA-gain range (0–18 dB), good linearity of VGA-gain curve (linear-in-dB), fast sampling rate (80 MHz), and high sampling resolution (14-bit). Furthermore, this new CDS circuit can automatically convert “single-ended input signal” into “dual-ended output signal,” facilitating subsequent signal processing. Finally, this proposed circuit is fabricated in SMIC 0.18 \(\upmu \hbox {m}\) 3.3 V CMOS process. Under 80 MHz sampling rate, the measurement results show that the SNR is 72.96 dB; the SFDR is 80 dB; and the ENOB is 11.54-bit.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Microelectronics, Xidian University, 2 South Taibai Road, Xi’an, 710071, People’s Republic of China

    Haoyu Zhuang, Zhangming Zhu, Jingyu Wang & Yintang Yang

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  1. Haoyu Zhuang
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  2. Zhangming Zhu
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  3. Jingyu Wang
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  4. Yintang Yang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zhangming Zhu.

Additional information

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61234002, 61322405, 61306044, 61376033), the National High-tech Program of China (2013AA014103).

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Zhuang, H., Zhu, Z., Wang, J. et al. CDS Circuit with High-Performance VGA Functionality and Its Design Procedure. Circuits Syst Signal Process 36, 1781–1805 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-016-0391-7

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