ABSTRACT
This chapter describes basic fundamentals and some important specifications of Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADC). It reviews the most popular ADC architectures and discusses the ADCs used for the digital TV applications and gives design examples. The chapter explores the fundamentals of the ADC and introduces a number of commonly used dynamic performance measures. The operation of ADCs can be better understood by looking at the ADC input-output transfer curve. Nyquist sampling rate. Based on the rate at which the input signals sampled relative to its bandwidth, ADCs are partitioned into two groups: Nyquist-rate ADCs and oversampling ADCs. The most important dynamic specification of an ADC is the signal-to-noise ratio. The chapter also reviews some of the most important architectures, which include the Nyquist ADCs and the oversampling ADC. The sub-ADC used in a pipelined stage is a flash ADC that consists of parallel comparators.
