Measuring harmonic distortion and noise floor of an A/D converter using spectral averaging

The author proposes to use spectral averaging techniques to measure the harmonic distortion and noise floor of an analog/digital (A/D) digitizing subsystem. The noise floor of an ideal B-bit A/D converter is derived in closed form. It is shown that this noise floor is a function of the A/D resolution B, the record length N, and the equivalent noise bandwidth E_B of the window function used in the discrete-Fourier-transform (DFT) computation. For an example, the noise floor is given for the case in which the magnitude square of the spectrum is averaged. Both experimental and simulation results are presented and it is shown that they are in good agreement with the theoretical results