3.1 Introduction

Modern design trends use the power and precision of the digital world of components to process analogue signals. However, the link between the digital/processing world and the analogue/real world is based on the analogue-to-digital and digital-to-analogue converter ICs, which generally are grouped together as the data converters.

Until about 1988, engineers had to stockpile their most innovative A-to-D converter (ADC) designs, because available manufacturing processes simply could not implement those designs onto monolithic chips economically[1]. Prior to 1988, except for the introduction of successive approximation, integrating and flash ADCs, the electronics industry saw no major changes in monolithic ADCs. Since then, manufacturing processes have caught up with the technology and many techniques such as sub-ranging flash, self-calibrating, delta/sigma, and many other special techniques have been implemented on monolithic chips.

High speed ADCs are used in a wide variety of real-time digital signal processing (DSP) applications, replacing systems that used analogue techniques alone[2]. The major reasons for using digital signal processing are that the cost of DSP processors has gone down, their speed and computational power have increased, and they are reprogrammable, allowing for system performance upgrades without hardware changes. DSP offers practical solutions that cannot be easily achieved in the analogue domain, for example, V.32 and V.34 modems.

This chapter provides an overview of design concepts and application guidelines for systems using modern analogue/digital and digital/analogue converters implemented on monolithic chips.