Data Converter Design – A Signal Processing Perspective

For the last three decades Moore’s law has provided the IC industry with smaller, faster, and cheaper transistors, facilitating integration of an increasing number of digital functions, thus propelling the growth of the semiconductor industry. However, this scaling trend poses greater challenges for analog and mixed-signal circuits that interface with real-world signals. The analog-to-digital interface is the performance bottleneck in most mixed-signal or communication systems.

We have reached an inflection point in the design of these interfaces: the “analog” designer must now know much more than analog design. “Calibration” techniques have been around for a few decades, where we have begun to incorporate a heavy content of digital signal processing to undo the analog imperfections. This has led to a new generation of analog designers who must be as innovative in the analog domain as in the digital signal processing domain.

This talk will discuss various data converter design techniques from a signal processing perspective, viz., generalized sampling techniques.