Static and Dynamic Nonlinearity of A/D Converters

Abstract

The dynamic range of broadband digital system is mostly limited byharmonics and spurious arising from ADC nonlinearity. The nonlinearitymay be described in several ways. The distinction between static anddynamic contributions has strong theoretical motivations but it isdifficult to independently measure these contributions. A morepractical approach is based upon analysis of the complex spectrum,which is well defined, easily measured, and may be used to optimize theADC working point and to somehow characterize both static and dynamicnonlinearity. To minimize harmonics and spurious components we need asufficient level of input noise (dither), which destroys theperiodicity at multistage pipelined ADC, combined with a carefulanalysis of the different sources of nonlinearity.