The PRO1 ASIC for fast Wilkinson encoding

Abstract

Wilkinson conversion of stored samples in large Switch CapacitorArray (SCA) ASICs, such as used for high speed waveform sampling, has manybenefits in terms of compactness, no missing output codes, low powerrequirements and robustness. However such Analog-to-Digitalconversions are relatively slow, limited by the encoder clock speed.By repeating the same fast sampling technique used by the SCA, combinedwith a fast priority encoder, significantly faster conversion isdemonstrated for a prototype ASIC designated PRO1. For 8–10 bits ofresolution, this technique is compact and requires far fewer systemresources.