A new signal acquisition technique

A signal acquisition technique that will result in a high-resolution high-speed analog-to-digital converter architecture is described. The basic idea is to have a simple analog circuit to acquire information about the input signal at high speed and a more complex digital signal processing block to generate a high-resolution digital output. This technique is based on recording the time instants at which the input signal crosses any of a fixed set of quantization levels and extracting additional information from the nonuniform sample sequence using interpolation methods. A board-level design was implemented to verify these principles for real input signals.<>