Analog-to-Information Conversion

Abstract

Over the past several decades, the symbiotic interplay between technology push and application pull has led to remarkable performance gains in analog-to-digital interfaces. While there appears to be no weakening in application pull, bottom-up innovation has slowed down. A promising remedy is to explore application-specific optimizations based on system and signal insights. Specifically, analog-to-information converters are designed to extract only the most relevant information for the given application from an analog signal towards its digitization. This approach contrasts conventional analog-to-digital interfaces which are typically designed for faithful waveform preservation and subsequent information extraction in the digital domain. In this chapter, we review performance trajectories of conventional data converters and discuss opportunities for application- and system-specific customizations toward analog-to-information conversion.