AD5791

Jun 04, 2024 Last reply: 2 years ago 25 Replies

"Accuracy" is an interesting word. The waveforms your are working aren't actually square waves - with zero edge transition - but have more or less exponential rising and falling edges.

You don't cares if the rising an falling edges have much the same stable shape, and if each exponential has effectively got to the rail before the next one starts.

Different rise and fall times complicate the error analysis, which is a tedious exercise (and one that I've done from time to time). One of engineers I worked with - and interviewed when he was first hired - did a six-digit DVM based on delta-sigma principles and he talked me through some of the problems during the job interview. I'd met them before on less accurate systems, which meant that he impressed the hell out of me.

He did some very nice work after we hired him - some of it on one of my projects.

Yeah, part of which is deterministic and part random. DAC noise shaping AIUI makes the the DS sum run in a limit cycle even for a fixed code, so that most of the switching junk is up at high frequency where it's easier to filter out. However, I'm not a delta-sigma expert.

(They call them sigma-deltas for some reason--possibly related to gang insignia.) ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Looking at the classic d-s architecture, a midscale code will be almost a square wave from the feedback quantizer, but near full scale the duty cycle will be very small. Edge density will change with input signal.

Every blip has a rise and a fall and they have to be match exactly to get the right average.

Maybe real chips do something else, charge balancing maybe.

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This stuff is hard to do also but we have competetion these days, unfortunately. 20 years ago we had a large market share. Unfortunately we had partners that had other ideas and that company turned into a non-profit.

Just hope the Chinese don't ever want to make the kind of things that you make, John.

I'm not sure why ADI calls their Sigma-Delta rather than Delta-Sigma.

Delta-Sigma is at least in the correct order for an A/D converter of these types.

We use those too but the audio converters are plenty good enough.

boB

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They were called Delta-Sigma (using the upper-case Greek characters) in the original paper by Inose, Yasuda, and Murakami (IRE Trans. Space Electron. Telemetry, vol. 8, pp 205-209, Sep 1962) and in quite a number of subsequent papers.

Whether they're called Sigma-Delta or Delta-Sigma seems to be almost a religious argument.

We were happy to be able to use real hardware in the late 1980s. Crytal Semiconductor at first I think.

The way I look at it, the delta part is the input and then the sigma from decimation and filtering. They worked really well for the time.

boB

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