Predictive Successive Approximation ADC

As the demand for better performance in terms of speed and power efficiency of the hardware increases because of the blooming industries such as the Internet of Things (IoT), the science and engineering tries to keep up. IoT is especially interested in faster interaction with the physical world at next to no cost, which is where the value of advancement in the field of A/D converters can be truly seen. Successive Approximation A/D converters (SA-ADC) have proven to be a solid solution for moderate speed and moderate resolution needs, at the same time consuming low power. However, the traditional SA-ADC needs N cycles to convert analog input signal to N-bit digital signal. Our proposed conversion method brings down the number of cycles to only one when configured properly, employing the concepts of oversampling and predicting the next value of the input signal. This can ultimately increase the speed of the SA-ADCs N-fold keeping the same power consumption, or even lower the power consumption when the signal has a narrow bandwidth. The proposed design is done with compatibility and cost-effectiveness in mind, so that it may be easily implemented in any currently existing SA-ADC designs.