Convertor boasts best-in-class specifications

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team May 11, 2005

The industry's first 16bit analogue-to-digital convertor to deliver 100Msample/s datarates offers best-in-class specifications for both signal-to-noise ratio and spurious-free dynamic range.

Analog Devices has developed the industry's first 16bit analogue-to-digital convertor (ADC) to deliver 100Msample/s datarates while offering both best-in-class signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR).

With military and aerospace communication systems, high-end medical devices, test and measurement equipment and other industrial and instrumentation applications demanding ever-higher resolution and faster sample rates, equipment manufacturers must pay particular attention to the need for signal noise reduction.

As part of a family of high-speed convertors optimised to deliver higher sample rates and improved dynamic performance at competitive prices, the AD9446 achieves a 10x increase in sample rates over other ADCs in its class while offering 90dBc SFDR and 80dBfs SNR at baseband - a full 6dB better than the SNR achieved by the closest competing ADC.

The AD9446 is available in an 80Msample/s speed-grade option that also achieves industry-leading 85dBc SFDR, while improving the signal-to-noise ratio by another 2dB to 82dBfs SNR.

"Today's industrial equipment manufacturers are under constant pressure to scale the performance of their products without introducing new sources of signal noise", said John Hussey, Vice President of the High Speed Convertor Group at Analog Devices.

"In the case of advanced test equipment, for example, designers are on the lookout for ways to improve noise while maintaining a wide enough performance margin to ensure the reliable, repeatable testing of high-performance components, boards and systems".

"To build equipment capable of accurate testing and rapid debugs, these manufacturers need the resolution, speed and low noise characteristics that are enabled by the AD9446".

"High-performance, high speed data convertors are one of the fundamental building blocks required to enable new generations of signal analysers", said Richard King, Vice President and General Manager of the Real-Time Spectrum Analyser Product Line at Tektronix.

"Tektronix has enjoyed the benefits of a great relationship with Analog Devices in our quest to produce the highest performance instruments available".

"The breakthrough level of performance achieved by the new AD9446 certainly promises to continue the trend of enabling new generations of high-performance instrumentation".

For high-performance test and measurement applications that use digital time sampling for frequency and time domain analysis, the AD9446 significantly lowers aperture jitter to just 60fs, compared with the 120 to 140fs range of competing ADCs.

Aperture jitter is the sample-to-sample variation in aperture delay and a major contributor to overall system signal degradation.

The reduced noise and 16bit resolution of the AD9446 combine to enable developers of instrumentation and automated test and measurement equipment, data acquisition systems, medical imaging devices and advanced military/aerospace communication subsystems to build more performance overhead into their designs by capturing a better representation of the input signal using fewer samples.

In addition to delivering the industry's best 16bit SFDR and SNR at baseband, the AD9446 is highly accurate and features a typical 16bit differential nonlinearity (DNL) of +/-0.5LSB and a typical 16bit integral nonlinearity (INL) of +/-3LSB.

The AD9446 is part of a family of high-speed ADCs that includes the recently introduced 14bit, 80Msample/s AD9444 and the 14bit, 125Msample/s AD9445.

As with the AD9444 and the AD9445, the new AD9446 features parallel low-voltage differential signalling (LVDS) outputs, including an output clock, which simplifies the interface to digital processing components and reduces the potential for digital noise coupling back into the ADC core.

The AD9446 ADC is sampling now with production quantities available in September 2005.

Available in a Pb-free, 100-lead surface mount plastic package (100-lead TQFP/EP), the AD9446-100 and AD9446-80 are priced at $79.90 and $72.25 each in 1000-unit quantities, respectively.