As an application engineer, I spend a lot of time convincing customers thata delta-sigma modulating analog-to-digital converter (ADC), or DSM, would be the best choice for their particular application. Then they come up with all sorts of excuses for why they prefer a successive-approximation ADC. I’ve come to the conclusion that they prefer successive-approximation ADCs because they fundamentally don’t understand how a DSM works, perhaps because DSMs involve both analog and digital design. This is unfortunate because, from a historical perspective, the DSM development has been gradual and straightforward to understand. If you have a digital-to-analog converter (DAC), a comparator, and some logic, you can build an ADC. The logic determines how quickly the answer is resolved. A successive-approximation register (SAR) uses logic to perform a binary search to quickly resolve the answer. To read more, click the download link below or visit Electronic Design.
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