Non-ideal effects of MOS capacitor in a switched capacitor waveform recorder ASIC

SCAs(Switched Capacitor Arrays) have a wide range of uses, especially in high energy physics, nuclear science and astrophysics experiments. This paper presents a method of using a MOS capacitor as a sampling capacitor to gain larger capacitance with small capacitor area in SCA design. It studies the non-ideal effects of the MOS capacitor and comes up with ways to reduce these adverse effects. A prototype SCA ASIC which uses a MOS capacitor to store the samples has been designed and tested to verify this method. The SCA integrates 32 channels and each has 64 cells and a readout amplifier. The stored voltage is converted to a pair of differential currents( 4m A max) and multiplexed to the output. All the functionalities have been verified. The power consumption is less than 2 m W/ch. The INL of all the cells in one channel are better than 0.39%. The equivalent input noise of the SCA has been tested to be 2.2 m V with 625 k Hz full-scale sine wave as input, sampling at 40 MSPS(Mega-samples per Second) and reading out at 5 MHz. The effective resolution is 8.8 bits considering 1 V dynamic range. The maximum sampling rate reaches up to 50 MSPS and readout rate of 15 MHz to keep noise smaller than 2.5 m V. The test results validate the feasibility of the MOS capacitor.