ABSTRACT
Analog-to-digital converters (ADC) are required for any application where an analog or continuous-time signal must be processed by digital systems. A variety of architectures is available for the design of ADCs with different characteristics, such as resolution, bandwidth, sampling frequency, power consumption, latency, and chip area. For the special case of Nyquist ADCs, the sampling frequency can be at least two times the maximum frequency of the input signal. In general, the trade-offs between the converter characteristics play an important role in determining the better ADC architecture for a given application. ADC architectures offer different compromises between the performance metrics. They are then chosen to be consistent with the specifications of the target application. Integrating ADCs can be implemented using single-slope, dual-slope, or multiple-slope architectures. The dual-slope ADC can be designed to allow bipolar operation and to incorporate a phase for the converter offset compensation.
