The PRO1 ASIC for Fast Wilkinson Encoding

TL;DR

This paper presents the PRO1 ASIC, which employs a fast Wilkinson encoding technique to achieve significantly faster analog-to-digital conversion in high-speed waveform sampling applications, with improved efficiency and compactness.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel ASIC design that combines fast sampling with a priority encoder to significantly accelerate Wilkinson ADC conversion speeds.

Findings

Achieved faster conversion speeds with the PRO1 ASIC.

Demonstrated compact design requiring fewer system resources.

Effective for 8-10 bits resolution applications.

Abstract

Wilkinson conversion of stored samples in large Switch Capacitor Array (SCA) ASICs, such as used for high speed waveform sampling, has many benefits in terms of compactness, no missing output codes, low power requirements and robustness. However such Analog-to-Digital conversions are relatively slow, limited by the encoder clock speed. By repeating the same fast sampling technique used by the SCA, combined with a fast priority encoder, significantly faster conversion is demonstrated for a prototype ASIC designated PRO1. For 8-10 bits of resolution, this technique is compact and requires far fewer system resources.