Testing ADC Spectral Performance Without Dedicated Data Acquisition

Static linearity and spectral performance are the most important parameters that need to be measured in an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) test. Testing these two types of parameters contributes the most significant part of ADC test cost. The relationship between integral nonlinearity (INL) and spectral performance has been used to reduce test cost in many research works. This paper comprehensively investigates the relationship and presents a low-cost test method that measures ADCs´ spectral performance based on measured INL values. By making use of INL measurement results, the method eliminates dedicated hardware and test time for spectral performance measurement. It only needs a small amount of computation to obtain ADC´s spectral performance. The method is useful in application where spectral performance only needs to be measured at low frequency. Simulation and experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the same measurement accuracy as a standard fast Fourier transform method.