Analog-to-digital converter

Abstract

Analog-to-Digital Converter (A/D converter) consisting of several continuously integrating charge balancing (CB) conversion stages. During each conversion interval, all CB capacitors are discharged by a reference current. In each stage, the end of the discharge of the CB capacitor is detected by a zero crossing detector. Time intervals between the zero crossing events and corresponding discharge termination events represent time equivalents of quantization errors. Each stage, other than the first, converts the time equivalents of quantization errors of the previous stage. Output of the entire multistage A/D converter is combined from the outputs of all stages in a way which provides compensation of a quantization error of any stage by the output of the next stage. Quantization noise (sequence of quantization errors) of the entire A/D converter becomes the same as the N-time differenced (N-number of stages) quantization noise of the last stage. The differencing shapes spectral density of quantization noise in such a way that the largest portion of the noise energy becomes shifted outside of the signal bandwidth. The larger the number of stages, the smaller the in-band portion of the quantization noise. The out-of-band portion of quantization noise can be filtered out in the post-conversion digital signal processing.