Overview
The A6B20G is a low-power, high-speed analog to digital converter (ADC) intellectual property (IP) design block. It is a FLASH-type ADC, with 6-bit resolution and a sampling rate of 20 giga samples per second (GSPS).
The ADC core has the highest bandwidth currently available, with a layout area of only 210 um x 470 um. It is a unique solution that provides an extremely high sampling rate, with a very low power consumption of only 331 mW.
It is the only IP core in this sampling rate class that is available with a high-speed input buffer, track and hold stage, and encoder -based full data rate output interface.
The cost-effective IP block has been designed and verified for the GF22FDX fabrication process with FDSOI technology to provide superior performance/power specifications.
Learn more about ADC IP core
This paper introduces a novel closed-loop testing methodology for efficient linearity testing of high-resolution Successive Approximation Register (SAR) Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs). Existing test strategies, including histogram-based approaches, sine wave testing, and model-driven reconstruction, often rely on dense data acquisition followed by offline post-processing, which increases overall test time and complexity.
Analog to digital converters have three key input ports along with data output ports as per digital resolution requirements. These inputs ports are Analog Signal, Reference and Clock. If we compare across most of the converter architectures then clock frequency is directly related to output data rate and latency of the data conversion.
The growing availability of digital ICs like microcontrollers, microprocessors, and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) allows developers to use complex digital processing techniques rather than analog signal conditioning. For this reason, analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) have become a widely-used component in mixed-signal circuits.
In high end RF systems, such as 5G radios, the requirements are so stringent that the source of this strongest unwanted tone can be the PLL. This article outlines how spurs in the input clock to the ADC or DAC may limit the SFDR. This in turn will set the requirements for the spurs for the input clock (from a PLL), in order to achieve a specific SFDR.
Power-sensitive applications such as Internet-of-Things (IoT) require a comprehensive power savings strategy within the system-on-chip (SoC). Techniques relying solely on the use of traditional power down modes and low supply voltage may not be enough to achieve the required power targets. The analog block is often assumed to be too sensitive and not compatible with aggressive power management techniques.
When continuously running a high speed ADC, it can be a challenge to deal with the firehose of raw data available at the output. To use City Semiconductor’s 2.5 GS/s 12-bit ADC, for example, 30 gigabits per second of data have to be accepted.
