Multisine With Optimal Phase-Plane Uniformity for ADC Testing

A multisine excitation signal enables fast and statistically robust measurement of the nonlinear behavior of analog devices under test. This paper describes the design considerations and constraints of a multisine excitation signal when it is applied to analog-to-digital converter testing. A novel phase-plane uniformity objective function followed by an optimization procedure is proposed to optimize the multisine excitation signal. Performance comparison between the proposed multisine design and other alternative multisine design is carried out. It is demonstrated that the proposed phase-space uniform multisine enables better representation of the conversion error distribution compared with existing multisine designs. This results in a more accurate assessment of the analog-to-digital converter performance.