Three ways of looking at a sigma-delta ADC device

By Vladyslav Kozlov, Dialog Semiconductor, a Renesas company

The growing availability of digital ICs like microcontrollers, microprocessors, and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) allows developers to use complex digital processing techniques rather than analog signal conditioning. For this reason, analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) have become a widely-used component in mixed-signal circuits.

There are many types of ADCs: successive-approximation ADCs, sigma-delta (ΣΔ) ADCs, direct-conversion ADCs, capacitor charge/discharge-based ADCs, ADCs with voltage-to-frequency converters, and others. All these ADCs provide different accuracy characteristics, sampling rate limitations, and cost points.

This article outlines three major design considerations for selecting a ΣΔ ADC.

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