Enhancing ADC Performance by Exploiting Signal Properties

This chapter starts with a brief introduction of the analog-to-digital conversion process in Sect. 2.1 and a discussion of factors that define the performance of ADCs in Sect. 2.2. ADC performance limitations and trends are addressed in Sect. 2.3. In Sect. 2.4, a brief discussion of popular Nyquist-rate ADC topologies is given where the topologies most relevant to the focus of this book are discussed with the associated tradeoffs. A signal/system-aware design approach which exploits certain signal properties to enhance the ADC performance is discussed in Sect. 2.5 and examples are shown.