Walt Kester
Analog Devices

Selecting the proper ADC for an application can be a daunting task for system design engineers. While IC manufacturers' selection guides and parametric search engines can be quite useful, a fundamental understanding of basic ADC architectures is invaluable in optimizing the converter selection process. The most popular ADC architectures today are successive approximation, sigmadelta, and pipelined. This paper discusses each of these architectures, placing the emphasis on application issues.