Histogram Based Testing Strategy for ADC

Abstract

An improved histogram testing method for analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is proposed. The proposed method reveals not only the static performance but also the dynamic ones, such as the effective number of bits (ENOB) with a sinusoidal input signal. Therefore, single histogram testing is performed rather than using both the histogram and spectral methods to reduce the total test cost. The proposed testing method was experimentally validated on a commercial 8-bit ADC to demonstrate it effectiveness. The experimental result indicated that the proposed histogram-based test method exhibits a good agreement to the measured results of the classical FFT-based method