Systematic figure of merit computation for the design of pipeline ADC

The emerging concept of SoC-AMS leads to research into new top-down methodologies to aid systems designers in sizing analog and mixed devices. The paper applies this idea to the high-level optimization of a pipeline ADC. Considering a given technology, it consists in comparing different configurations according to their imperfections and their architectures without FFT computation or time-consuming simulations. The final selection is based on a figure of merit.