ADC compensation using a sinewave histogram method

Abstract

The need for high dynamic range analog to digital converters (ADCs) is strong due to the growing use of digital signal processing in communications applications. ADC performance has improved over the years due to advances in both design concepts and semiconductor technologies. However most ADCs still still exhibit undesirable distortion in addition to quantization error, thus limiting spurious free dynamic range, (SFDR), in digital receiver applications. This paper describes a new method for developing ADC error function models using standard sinewave histogram methods. The method provides better error representation by providing error basis functions for every state. Results show this method is capable of removing all slope dependent errors in complex ADC error models and application to a 200 MSPS ADC showed more than 10 dB improvement in SFDR over the full Nyquist band for the ADC.