The Race for the Extra Decibel: A Brief Review of Current ADC Performance Trajectories

At the turn of this century, there was widespread concern that the performance of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) might have reached a saturation point and would, in fact, deteriorate as we began to scale into deep submicron CMOS technology. The past 15 years of innovation have clearly refuted such fears. Driven by a combination of application pull, architectural modifications, and relentless optimization, we have seen steady improvements in several key performance metrics.