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Distortion analysis for highly linear circuits (Read 53 times)
Vivek Sharma
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Distortion analysis for highly linear circuits
Jun 28th, 2005, 7:15am
 
Hi,

I am trying to simulate the linearity of an opamp in a 20-bit delta-sigma application. I would like to simulate it in Spectre.

I am not sure how I can manage this. In order to see the harmonics, I need to achieve a noise floor of about -120 dBFS and this would require simulating the circuit for about 2^20 samples, which is out of question. Moreover, I read in the docs on this site that PSS-based analyses dont work for delta-sigma ADCs as they do not have periodic states, or atleast the period is usually too large.

Is it possible to simulate the nonlinear distortion in some way?

Thanks
Vivek
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sheldon
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Posts: 751

Re: Distortion analysis for highly linear circuits
Reply #1 - Jun 28th, 2005, 8:34am
 
Vivek,

  Should be no problem simulating the op-amp and
getting the noise floor you are targeting. However,
simulating the op amp by itself really is not meaningful
and you will probably need to simulate the entire
Delta-Sigma ADC to make the measurements you
need. It should be possible to look at the distortion
without running 2^20 points. Somewhere between
2048 and 16384 should be enough, look at the FFT
plots in the following document, they use 65536 point
FFT and have plenty of dynamic range.

http://www.imse.cnm.es/esd-msd/WORKSHOPS/MIXMODEST/PRESENTATIONS/medeiro2.pdf

Some other things to watch are:
1) You need to use windowing function when performing
    the  FFT, for example, the hanning window. Unlike
    Pipeline ADC, windowing is required when performing
    an FFT on a Delta-Sigma ADC
2) You also  need to control the simulation accuracy, try
    using Spectre's relref=pointlocal and
    method=gear2only

BTW, if you do this simulation at transistor level it will
take a while, filter the outputs to prevent filling up the
disk. Also consider strobing the outputs, again to minimize
the data size.


                                                         Best Regards,

                                                              Sheldon
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Vivek Sharma
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Re: Distortion analysis for highly linear circuits
Reply #2 - Jun 29th, 2005, 6:50am
 
Hi Sheldon,

Thanks a lot. I am able to observe the harmonics very clearly now. I previously used coherent sampling and a rectangular window. Usually, this approach works quite well for me, but in this case, the window transfer function was getting in the way.

I am sure that I will be able to test the THD in the overall system with this scheme.

Regards
Vivek
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