
High-resolution ADCs are essential components in many biomedical and environmental sensing applications. As the demands for wearable, miniature and point-of-care systems keep increasing, the design requirements for high-resolution ADCs also get more stringent, with strong emphasis on energy efficiency, reliability, and low cost. Over the past few years, many design techniques have been developed to excel the figure-of-merit (FoM) of high-resolution ADCs, where the state-of-the-arts has gotten really close to the theoretical limit. Nonetheless, many of these works overlooked an important factor: the signal chain friendliness. While the ADC cores are made to be very efficient, the heavy burdens exerted on the input driver and/or reference buffer are hardly relaxed by those techniques, and sometimes get exacerbated in some architectures. Consequently, the improvement on energy efficiency and cost are limited in the context of the complete signal chain. In this talk, I will introduce some of our works that shed light onto this blind spot. They demonstrate how to harmonize energy efficiency and signal chain burden reduction through a synergistic combination of noise cancellation, embedded buffer design as well as dynamic amplification.