Energy-efficient DAC switching technique for single-ended SAR ADCs

A novel energy-efficient digital-to-analog converter (DAC) switching technique applicable to single-ended successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is presented. The proposed DAC switching technique facilitates the ADC to digitize an input signal in the entire amplitude range of [0, Vref] using only a single reference voltage of Vref2. The proposed DAC switching technique achieves 92.3% savings in switching energy as compared to the traditional DAC switching method in single-ended SAR ADCs. The performance of the proposed DAC switching technique and its comparison with previous reported works have been validated through behavioral simulations.