• Murmann’s ADC Performance Survey

Recent ADC designers in the scientific world usually take Murmann’s Spreadsheet as a benchmark for their ADC performance. The survey  contains experimental data from two top conferences (ISSCC & VLSI Symposium) between 1997 and now (2012), covering 346 ADCs reported 1997-2012.

I’m curious to know how the breakdown of ADCs  in his survey according to different architectures. They are mainly categorized  as pipeline ADCs, sar ADCs, flash ADCs, folding ADCs, algorithmic ADCs, subranging ADCs, cyclic ADCs,  time-interleaved Nyquist ADCs, and oversampling ADCs. In addition, other minority Nyquist ADCs are grouped together, such as ‘Two-step’, ‘Binary search’, and etc. . I wrote a Matlab script to deal with the spreadsheet and did a following plot:

Fig. 1 Breakdown of ADCs in Murmann’s spreadsheet according to architectures.

We can see that oversampling ADCs do take a big portion(139), then follows pipeline ADCs(82), sar ADCs(29), and flash ADCs(21). Besides, time-interleaved ADCs are also a hot topic. While, algorithmic, subranging, and cyclic ADCs unite to a silent corner.

Murmann’s spreadsheet serves well as a benchmark, and it’s open source. However, if we want to use it to see trends across ADC architectures, we may meet with the problem of insufficient data for certain ADC architectures and end up with wrong conclusions.

Then, someone else did a much more exhaustive survey – Mr. Converter Passion!

• Mr. Converter Passion’s Survey of ADC Performance Evolution

I am really impressed by Mr. Converter Passion’s capability of dealing with large amount of data and of course his passion&patience! His data set is based on scientific publications published from 1974 to present day in IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits and IEEE Transactions on Circuit and Systems, as well as SEVEN major conferences! A paper published by him in 2010 [1] mentioned that the total number of ADCs in his survey is more than 1400!

But, it’s not open source. There is no click for a spreadsheet 😉

Don’t be 100% sad. He has a blog, where he talks about different ADC performance evolution as well as broad topics related with converter design. You will find passion there!

[1] Bengt E. Jonsson, “A Survey of A/D-Converter Performance Evolution”, ICECS, 2010.