A 10GS/s single-core 8-bit ADC with an ENOB above 7.0 up to 4.2GHz

An 8b folding and interpolating ADC designed in a 180GHz SiGe BiCMOS process operates at 10GS/s without resorting to interleaving. It achieves an ENOB of 7.44 at 40kHz and 6.95 at 4.995GHz for a power dissipation of 9.1W, which corresponds to an energy per conversion step of 7.4pJ. Data output occurs in real time over ten 10Gb/s serial lanes using a proprietary protocol.