ADC noise article and all about delta-sigma converters

Dave Van Ess, an apps engineer over at Cypress Semiconductor has a nice article about ADC noise over at Electronic Design. Now me, being an analog curmudgeon, I don’t see how you can call “noise” something deterministic like ADC quantization error, but that it what everybody seems to be calling it. Maybe it is like when the digital guys started calling bus-width bandwidth, because lets face it, bandwidth is a pretty cool word. Anyway, Dave brings up an important concept and a critical factor for preparing your signal path error budgets. EDN’s Bonnie Baker wrote about noise here, and another good noise article here. She elaborated on the subtle ac and dc differences involving ENOB (effective number of bits) and SNR (signal to noise) problems in this great article.

Also see Dave’s stuff on integrating and delta-sigma ADC.

And I would be remiss if I did not mention Bonnie’s large body of work on delta-sgma converters:

How the SNRs of delta-sigma converters differ

Delta-sigma ADCs in a nutshell

Delta-sigma ADCs in a nutshell, part 2: the modulator

Delta-sigma ADCs in a nutshell, part 3: the digital/decimator filter

Delta-sigma ADCs in a nutshell, part 4: noise versus data rate

And if you are going to feed a delta-sigma converter with a multiplexer, check out Bonnie’s story:

“Muxing” around with delta-sigma converters