IMPROVED CONVERGENCE IN A DIGITAL SIGNAL AVERAGER

摘要

A method for improving the speed of convergence to sub-least-significant-bit accuracy and precision in a digital signal averager when the measurements are averaged over many samples where the noise inherent in the signal is not large compared to 1 LSB. A slider offset circuit (10) implements the method which adds offsets to an analog input signal acquired from an analog sensor (20). The slider offset circuit (10) compensates for limitations in the resolution of an analog-to-digital converter (28) by adding a sub-least-significant-bit offset to the input signal. Similarly, the slider offset circuit (10) compensates for the differential non-linearity using a Gatti offset which are whole number multiples of the average voltage bin width. Speed of convergence to sub-LSB accuracy is further improved by employing non-consecutive increments in the two sliders (22, 24).