Difference-equalisation based estimation of timing skew for time-interleaved ADCs in communication systems

A difference-equalisation based method is presented to estimate timing skew adaptively in time-interleaved analogue-to-digital converters (ADCs). By digital zero-crossing detection and calculating the mean of the absolute difference between adjacent sub-ADC’s outputs, the timing mismatch information for each channel can be identified easily. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can estimate timing skew accurately. Furthermore, the proposed method requires far fewer samples to estimation than the previous methods. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2019.