Importance

Loading Importance Indicators...

Abstract

A pipelined ADC that does not wait for the residue of a signal to settle to be delivered to the next stage of the pipeline, and thus passes signals to subsequent stages at faster than conventional speeds is described. A pipelined ADC is used that processes signals representing the boundaries of the search space. Thus, each stage does not necessarily receive the signal as pre-processed by the prior stage, but rather the search space boundaries as pre-processed by the prior stage. Reducing the “search space” of the ADC is equivalent to creating the residues in each step of a pipeline as in the prior art. An ADC operating in this fashion operates without error even if the residual search space boundary outputs from one state are presented to the next stage before the outputs have settled, and can run faster for a given power and bandwidth.

Loading the Abstract Image...

First Claim