High-Speed ADC Architectures

The rapid technological evolution leads to CMOS technologies with lower feature sizes, allowing the integration of more complex systems in an single integrated circuit. The digital circuits, which are designed at a high level of abstraction, benefit directly from those advanced technologies, leading to a sustained increase in the available memorization and processing capabilities.

In this way, there is a tendency to make all the signal processing in the digital domain. Quite often the signals to be processed are analog and, in some cases, must become analog after the digital processing. This requires the utilization of components that make the translation between the two domains: the Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) receives an analog signal and produces its binary coded representation; the Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) performs the opposite operation. The complete integration of a system — which may include a digital processor, memory, ADC, DAC, signal conditioning amplifiers, frequency translation, filtering, reference voltage/current generator, etc. — in the same CMOS die is of the upmost importance, to reduce costs.