Recent advances have been made to perform as much analog compute as possible before converting to the digital processing thereby mitigating ADC overhead. For example, one effective technique is to perform the analog shift-and-add before the ADC for different significant bits in the weight precision [68]. This could potentially save Vin Flash ADC DAC 2N - 1 Comparators Thermometer to Binary Encoder CLK VDAC Vin S/H - + Dn-1 Dn-2 D1 D0 SAR Logic Digital Output SAR ADC 1,400 1,200 1,000 800 600 400 200 34 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 56 Resolution (Bit) (a) Power (mW) 10 12 14 16 2 4 6 8 34 56 Resolution (Bit) (c) SAR FLASH Figure 7. Comparison between SAR-ADC and Flash-ADC on (a) area, (b) latency, (c) power, and (d) energy. Simulated performed at 40 nm. THIRD QUARTER 2021 IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 43 34 56 Resolution (Bit) (d) Energy (pJ) Area (µm2) 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 34 56 Resolution (Bit) (b) Latency (ns) Reference Inputs COMP COMP COMP N-Bit Digital Output COMP