A Versatile Setup to Test and Program an Incremental Analog-to-Digital Converter

Incremental analog-to-digital converters are particularly well suited for instrumentation and measurement systems. This is due to their good accuracy, low offset and noise performance, and conversion times much shorter than conventional dual-slope ADCs. To test these ADCs an automatic setup is mandatory since it requires processing the ADC data in a statistic way to find their characteristic parameters. In this paper a versatile setup based on a microcontroller is presented. The set-up allows to test static and dynamic performances and to program different algorithms in a novel first order incremental ADC. The basic building blocks of the ADC are based on super class-AB amplifiers featuring high slew rate and efficient power consumption. Measurement results from a 0.5 mum prototype are provided to corroborate the proper operation of circuits and techniques proposed.