How Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) Works
By Gabriel Torres on April 21, 2006 Page 5 of 10

Inside an ADC

You can consider the analog-to-digital converter as a closed box, as shown on Figure 5. But what is inside the box? That is exactly what we are going to explain now.

Analog to Digital Converter
click to enlarge
Figure 5: Analog-to-digital converter.

There are several ways to build an ADC. We can divide ADC design into four main groups:

  • Parallel design (also known as Flash ADC);
  • Digital-to-Analog Converter-based design (e.g. ramp counter, successive approximation, tracking);
  • Integrator-based design (e.g. single-slope, dual-slope);
  • Sigma-delta design (also known as delta-sigma, 1-bit ADC or oversampling ADC).

Each one of these main groups can have several different implementations. We are going to talk about each one of these groups individually.


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