Publications
Scientific publications
Many scientific articles, papers, and proceedings are written by Axiom IC employees. Some have won the best paper award. On the left-hand side of the screen and below you can find the publications categorized by year.
White paper ADC: Pipeline versus SAR
In the past decades, the pipeline converter has become very popular in the industry. The basic implementation requires accurate operational amplifiers and capacitors. With newer technology nodes, the implementation of high gain op amps has become less trivial and the need for low power consumption has driven the development of modern pipeline converters with low gain amplifiers in combination with extensive calibration scheme's.
Successive Approximation Register (SAR) ADCs have been around for a long time. In fact this was the first ADC architecture, buildup of a DAC, a comparator and a register. Since it does not require any amplifiers, its power consumption can be very low. Recent developments have significantly improved its sample-rate and the architecture fits very well to modern process technologies: switches and capacitors scale very well.
The white paper compares the pipeline and SAR ADC architectures, starting with a circuit level comparison in the first chapter and followed by a comparison based on literature study in chapter two. Chapter three deals with very high speed conversion (> 500 MS/s) and chapter four discusses high resolution conversion (> 14 ENOB).
This white paper “Pipeline versus SAR” is available under NDA. Contact us by phone or e-mail info@axiom-ic.com
How the “digital” amplifier becomes more digital.
At the Bits & Chips Conference on June 9, Sander Gierkink from Axiom IC presented: How the “digital” amplifier becomes more digital. The slides of this presentation can be downloaded here. The key-element in a true digital audio amplifier is the feedback ADC. This ADC must have a high resolution and low-latency to make the feedback with high performance in the audio band possible. This ADC is in development and is expected to be available by the end of 2011.