Capacitor-Chain Successive-Approximation ADC

A proposed successive approximation analog-to-digital converter (ADC) would contain a capacitively terminated chain of identical capacitor cells (see figure). Like a conventional successive approximation ADC containing a bank of binary scaled capacitors, the proposed ADC would store an input voltage on a sample and hold capacitor and would digitize the stored input voltage by finding the closest match between this voltage and a capacitively generated sum of binary fractions of a reference voltage (Vref). However, the proposed capacitor-chain ADC would offer two major advantages over a conventional binary scaled-capacitor ADC: