Performance analysis of analog-to-digital converters

Usage of digital receivers in today´s radar and electronic warfare applications is becoming more common. Analog to digital converters (ADC) used in digital receivers play a significant role in the performance of these receivers. Therefore, it is very important to obtain performance analysis of possible ADC´s under different conditions such as different temperature etc. before making final decision of the ADC to be used in the digital receiver. It is obvious that it would be very helpful to get results of integration of different ADC´s with the existing system and to test ADC´s under different conditions that may not exist on data sheets. For this reason, a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based board is designed in order to gather digital output of ADC being evaluated and a graphical analysis software responsible for analyzing gathered digital output is developed. Developed infrastructure enables us to compare performances of different ADC´s in the same system and in same conditions by replacing only the ADC to be analyzed.