Characterization of state-of-the art 15-bit, 10 MHz A/D converter

When testing state-of-the-art high-speed high-resolution A/D converters measurements can only be as good as the signal source, since noise and distortion in the signal generator directly affect the characterization results. The noise of the signal generator must be well below the noise of the converter being tested. We characterized nonlinearities of a state-of-the-art 15-bit, 10 MHz A/D converter employing both crystal oscillators and a waveform generators. This paper describes the A/D converter and the digital test bed used. This paper evaluates the test data in the frequency domain based on spectral analysis as well as phase domain analysis and compares the two analyses results. The key A/D converter dynamic parameters were measured at thirteen different amplitude levels at each of five frequencies, but only the 470 kHz results are presented. In addition, we measured the total jitter of the A/D converter plus test fixture.