I will present several unconventional data conversion architectures. First, I will talk about how we can make use of noise, which is usually deemed as an undesirable thing, to estimate the conversion residue and increase the SNR of a SAR ADC. It is an interesting example of stochastic resonance, in which the presence of noise can lead to not SNR degradation but SNR enhancement. Second, I will talk about how we can perform data conversion below the Nyquist rate by exploiting the sparsity of the input signal. I will show two examples of compressive sensing ADCs and how the effective ADC conversion rate can be reduced by 4 times but without losing information. Third, I will discuss hybrid ADC architectures, especially the combination of SAR and delta-sigma ADC. This novel noise-shaping SAR ADC can achieve high power efficiency and high resolution but without the need for any explicit amplifier. Last, but not least, I will show our groups' research on time/phase-domain delta-sigma ADCs that use simple logic gates for integration and quantization. They can not only achieve high performance and are scaling friendly, but also are fully synthesizable using standard digital flow, greatly improving productivity.

Nan Sun is Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He received the B.S. degree from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 2006, where he ranked top and graduated with the highest honor. He received the Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in 2010. Dr. Sun received the NSF Career Award in 2013, and the Jack Kilby Research Award from UT Austin in both 2015 and 2016. He holds the AMD Endowed Development Chair from 2013 to 2017. He serves on the Technical Program Committee of the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference and the IEEE Asian Solid-State Circuit Conference. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems – I: Regular Papers, and a Guest Editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. He also serves as IEEE Circuits-and-Systems Society Distinguished Lecturer from 2019 to 2020.