System Aspects of Analog to Digital Converter Designs

Summary form only for tutorial. In this section, the principles of operation of data-converters, the different architectures, and the important specification parameters are presented. We begin by discussing the fundamental processes of analog-digital conversion: quantization, sampling, resolution. The various figures-of-merit of an ADC such as integral nonlinearity (INL), differential nonlinearity (DNL) and signal-noise ratio (SNR) are then presented. In the second part of this section, a classification of well-known A/D converter architectures is presented. The advantages and disadvantages of each of these architectures, their respective resolution-speed-power consumption ranges, and the applications in which they find use are discussed.