Full information ADC test procedures using sinusoidal excitation, implemented in MATLAB and LabVIEW

Abstract

Analog-to-digital converters and the need to test these devices appeared simultaneously. Thus, ADC circuit realizations and test methods evolved also simultaneously. In the last decades several techniques have been elaborated and spread worldwide. These are available in IEEE standards and in the literature as well. However, standard methods do not support the recognition of incorrect measurement settings. Accurate test results require careful choice of settings and calculated quality parameters of the ADC under test are very sensitive to imperfections of the measurement setup. In addition, the requirements are different for each test technique and the restrictions can even be contradicting (e.g. overdrive is recommended for histogram test and contraindicated for FFT test). This paper presents solutions to perform the commonly used methods reliably and some advanced methods to increase the performance of ADC quality parameter estimation. Implementations of the proposed algorithms are presented as well, with URL for download.