Very High-Performance Advanced Filter Bank Analog-to-Digital Converter (AFB ADC) Project

摘要

This Phase 1 project demonstrated a breakthrough approach to very high speed, high resolution analog to digital conversion which improves the speed of conversion by four to six times the state of the art by using a parallel array of individual commercial off the shelf converters. The significant performance improvements afforded by the Advanced Filter Bank Analog to Digital Converter (AFB ADC) architecture were verified in Phase 1 by successfully building and testing a pre-prototype breadboard implementation of the front end electronics of a 12-bit AFB ADC system with 260 MHz sample rate, spurious free dynamic range of greater than 70 dB, and analog sampling bandwidth of 130 MHz. Test results confirm that the architecture works because the signal processing significantly reduces the sensitivity to analog mismatches (e.g., phase distortion, clock skew, temperature drift) which prohibit existing parallel conversion methods (e.g., Time Interleaving) from achieving high resolution. The AFB ADO architecture will always exceed the state of the art because it can easily be upgraded as new, more powerful ADC products become available. By eliminating racks of analog electronics, the high performance AFB ADC can significantly reduce the size, power, and cost of radar systems and RF receivers by performing more of the processing digitally in reconfigurable software.