Sinewave parameter estimation algorithm with application to waveform digitizer effective bits measurement

A high-performance algorithm to estimate the four parameters (amplitude, DC offset, frequency and phase) of a sine wave from a sampled data record is presented. The estimation errors are obtained in closed form and can be controlled. The algorithm is non iterative and extremely fast. A Turbo Pascal implementation on the IBM PC/AT requires only a couple of seconds to do a 256-point fit. A method to measure a digitizer´s effective bits using this algorithm is presented. Simulation results indicate that the method gives excellent estimates of the true resolution of the simulated ideal digitizer. A 10-point effective-bits plot of a waveform digitizer under test can be accomplished in seconds instead of minutes or even hours as with other iterative algorithms