Measurement of high-speed ADCs

High-speed high-resolution ADCs are challenging in design and measurement. High accuracy on data and clock input have to be ensured. To minimize nonlinearity, it is important to avoid signal-dependent errors. With these goals in mind, we discuss design trade-offs that have to be considered for high-resolution ADCs. Furthermore, a full measurement setup using needle probing for high-speed ADCs is described. On-chip memory enables accurate analysis of the output samples without the need for a high-speed digital interface or data decimation. An efficient shift-register-based approach for an on-chip memory to handle the large aggregated output data of highly interleaved ADCs is presented. The shift-register-based custom memory is compared with a register-based synthesized memory in terms of area and energy efficiency.