Lightweight Fault Resilient Flexible Flash-ADCs

Flexible Electronics (FE) are emerging as a promising alternative for low-cost, conformal, and sustainable wearable and edge applications, enabling on-and near-sensor processing. In such systems, Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) are critical components, as they interface analog sensors with the digital processing backend and directly affect overall system correctness. However, the low-cost fabrication of FE leads to increased variability, making flexible circuits more prone to manufacturing defects and runtime faults compared to conventional silicon, particularly in mixed-signal components such as ADCs. Within this work, we propose a fault-resilient Flash ADC, motivated by its architectural simplicity and suitability for low-and mid-range bitwidths, which are the primary targets of FE applications. Specifically, we propose a lightweight fault-resilient Flash ADC digital backend tailored to the constraints of FE. Our approach employs a sequential counter-based thermometer-to-binary encoder with integrated fault-correction logic. Across various bitwidths designs, the proposed architecture achieves up to 97.7% and 93.8% single and double-fault recovery respectively, while reducing area and power by up to 2.7× and 3.9×.