The continuous-time pipelined(CTP) ADC is an emerging analog-to-digital converter that combines anti-alias filtering and quantization in a single unit. It presents a resistive input impedance making it easy to drive, and places relaxed requirements on amplifiers used in the ADC. The CTP ADC attempts to address many of the challenges of discrete-time pipelined analog-to-digital conversion. This brief is a first-principles introduction to this recent architecture. © 2004-2012 IEEE.