Many data acquisition systems benefit from higher sampling rate for a given vertical resolution (measurement accuracy). Unfortunately limitations in analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) put restrictions on which sampling rates that can be achieved - and for ADCs with higher resolution the limitations are more severe.

Time-interleaved ADCs (TIADCs) is a well-recognized approach to increase the sampling rate and many of today's high-performance ADC components are based on this approach. However, the internal structure of these components introduces analog mismatch errors which degrade performance unless calibrated or corrected.

The mismatches in TIADCs create a nonlinear distortion effect called aliasing that often limits the Spurious-Free Dynamic Range (SFDR) and this may in turn have a negative effect on other performance parameters such as the effective number of bits (ENOB).

SP Devices can as the only digitizer vendor provide performance enhanced data acquisition solutions based on the ADX technology for TIADCs. The ADX IP-core operates in the background and removes this aliasing distortion over a large portion of the frequency band - yielding performance that surpasses ADC datasheet specifications. The technology is used/promoted by a number of leading ADC and oscilloscope vendors.

The figure below illustrates how ADX is used to increase the performance of the ADC used in SP Devices' ADQ412-3G digitizer. The 12-bit ADC is operated at a sampling rate of 3.6 GS/s and trough the use of ADX the time-interleaving spur is attenuated over 90% of the Nyquist band - for certain frequencies with up to 20 dB!

The time-interleaving spur of SP Devices' ADQ412-3G (green line) digitizer is significantly better (more negative number is better) than the performance of the ADC itself (red dashed line). Plot shows typical values.

Press the button Read More below to download our white paper "Digital Time-Interleaved ADC Mismatch Error Correction Embedded into High-Performance Digitizers" which contains more information about the achieved resolution improvement levels.

Several of SP Devices' digitizers are delivered with ADX embedded and thereby offer enhanced spurious performance compared to other digitizer products employing time-interleaved analog-to-digital converters.

Besides the obvious advantages offered by ADX, the digitizers of course also supports a wide variety of other features such as advanced trigger capabilities, deep on-board acquisition memory, open FPGA, and a large set of pre-defined real-time digital signal processing features.

The table below lists our products that are delivered with ADX, but please also feel free to click here to read more about our complete digitizer product portfolio.

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