New measurement procedure for the static test of ADCs

This paper presents a new measurement procedure for the static test of analog-to-digital converters. It uses a variable step size calculated by using an extrapolated convergence factor method that results in a dramatic reduction of the duration of the test. The new method is compared with the standardized procedures in what concerns the resulting code edge standard deviation and the time consumed by the test for different conditions of the step size, the collected number of samples and the rms value of noise in the experimental setup. Both experimental and numerical simulation results show that the new procedure can substitute with advantage the traditional tests, when a high resolution (small step size) is desired and the rms value of noise is bigger than 0.5 LSB, as it is usual in high resolution ADCs.