An analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is a device or circuit element that converts an analog signal to a digital data. For example, digital data can include a number of different digital codes, and each of the digital codes can correspond to a unique voltage or current level of the analog signal.
Advances in complimentary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technologies have dramatically improved the performance of systems which generally require an ADC as an interface. As the performance of such systems continues to improve, the performance of analog-to-digital conversion is becoming more important as analog-to-digital conversion is starting to become the system bottleneck in performance as well as power consumption. In addition to the concern of power consumption, some of the challenges in designing an ADC in such scaled CMOS technologies include, for example, a higher resolution, a higher sampling rate leading to a higher bandwidth, etc.