Now that's an expensive converter...

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Samuel Groner

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http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/ADS5400MHFSV/ADS5400MHFSV-ND/2596724

The listed price is not a misprint. 12 bit at 1 GHz! Well, nothing for audio (unless you roll your own sigma-delta with it).

Samuel
 
Also good luck storing that data stream somewhere! Needs pretty significant storage space and perhaps some advanced compression algorithms that require heavy duty DSP chips themselves.
 
But think of all the money you will save because you don't need anti-aliasing filters.  8)

1Gsps is a little faster than I would use for audio capture.  IMO

JR

 
My first stab at a use would be for digital oscilloscopes. Most DSOs at this speed (or higher) are 8 bits. 12 would be kinda nice for some applications.

I've seen DSO front ends designed by time-multiplexing multiple ADCs, say 10 100MHz ones, to achieve a 1GHz sample rate. If you did that with this, you could achieve a 10Ghz sample rate with ten of these chips at... $145,920. That's just for these chips.

Agilent makes a 12Ghz DSO for $140,000. They must be using a different trick. Or they're down at 8 bits.
 
My bachelor thesis two years ago was part of a similar project. It was a 1Gsps/10-12bit ADC that was meant to be used for RADAR applications if I remember correctly. It was ordered by some big company that produces military equipment.

The converter was a 4th order sigma-delta modulator, also using a feedforward path. The novel and interesting thing about it was using a multi-bit flash converter with a two-step quantizer internally instead of the typically used 1-bit comparator. The two-step approach helps tremendously saving power and space (example calculation: 8bit flash: 255 comparators; 2x 4bit flash: 30 comparators) while practically achieving comparable performance. Drawbacks exist of course. Implementing this internal ADC on a system level was the topic of my work, I did no actual circuit design. The 15k price tag from Digikey was about the cost for one run of 10 sample ICs for testing purposes ;D.
 
Sounds like a great project to get started on... At that speed lots of analog engineering inside those digital chips.

IC design is the final frontier for analog designers.

JR
 

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