A robust ADC code hit counting technique

This paper presents a robust, low-cost ADC code hit counting technique to record the number of times each ADC output code word appears with respect to the ramp input. Using a smart center code tracking engine, the proposed code hit counter performs robustly against the code transition noise, missing code segments, and non-monotonicity; furthermore, the required hardware and test time is at the same level as the known best results. The robustness together with the low overhead makes the proposed code hit counter suitable for (on-line) ADC self-testing and self-calibration applications.