CMOS pipelined ADC employing dither to improve linearity

This paper presents a new method for applying linearity improving dither to a pipelined ADC employing digital error correction. This dither energy remains internal to the converter, only causing correctable errors in the internal uncorrected digital data stream. Unlike adding dither to the input signal, this new dither method does not consume signal bandwidth or dynamic range. Spurious free dynamic range improvements of 15 dB have been realized.