Towards uncharted territories: High-performance and high-bandwidth ringamp-based delta-sigma ADCs
 
Towards uncharted territories: High-performance and high-bandwidth ringamp-based delta-sigma ADCs 
 
Lucas Santana
 
Abstract 

This research is about making devices that can convert real-world analog signals (like sound or light) to computer-world digital signals (ones and zeros) faster and with better quality. Those devices help create new applications like high-quality video recording and direct radio frequency conversion. There are many ways to make these devices, and this research looked at a specific architecture called the Discrete-Time Delta-Sigma Modulator. This architecture was limited in how fast it works, but we found a way to improve it using a unique design process and efficient technology. We created two prototypes, one that could work twice as fast the current state-of-the-art and another that could work even faster and efficiently. These prototypes covered a region of uncharted specification territories for this type of analog-to-digital converter. They helped prove that there was no fundamental limitation for the highest speed achieved by the previous state-of-the-art.