ADC testing based on IEEE 1057-94 standard-some critical notes

In recent years, IEEE 1057-94 Standard for specifying and testing measurement devices based on analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) earned scientific interest in several topics. In particular, investigations showed the histogram test of the Standard to be insensitive to ADC hysteresis. In this paper, an alternative procedure for determining the dynamic transfer function of an ADC with hysteresis is proposed. The procedure exploits digital signal processing to reduce the huge amount of data required by the histogram test. Numerical and experimental results of performance characterization, comparison with a state-of-the-art procedure and noise-sensitivity analysis are presented and discussed.