The design of analog-to-digital converters
(ADCs) requires a starting phase to specify system
parameters which define the basic characteristics of the
target converter. This initial phase is usually made using
some kind of behavior modeling. The development of an
ADC simulator requires the behavior modeling of the basic
building blocks and their possible interconnections to form
the final converter. This paper presents a Pipeline ADC
simulator tool (SCALES) which allows topology selection
and digital calibration of the frontend blocks. Several block
non-linearity’s are included in the simulation, such as
thermal noise, capacitor mismatch, gain and offset errors,
parasitic capacitances, settling errors and other error
sources. SCALES was developed in Python to allow
platform independence in today’s computer systems.