The Other ADC Test [Shop Talk: What You Didn’t Learn in School]

Most converter folks I know are obsessed with spectral performance, and rightly so. After all, most analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) these days work as “waveform coders”; their output is intended for some frequency-domain purpose. Of course, time-domain “measurement” applications are still out there, especially in the high-precision realm, but the communications boom has caused many to abandon integral nonlinearity and differential nonlinearity (DNL) for spurious free dynamic range.