Unlimited Sampling from Theory to Practice: Fourier-Prony Recovery and Prototype ADC

TL;DR

This paper advances the practical implementation of unlimited sampling by developing a Fourier domain recovery algorithm, validated through experiments on a prototype ADC, bridging theory and real-world hardware applications.

Contribution

It introduces a new Fourier domain recovery algorithm that addresses non-idealities in hardware, enabling practical unlimited sampling from real analog-to-digital converters.

Findings

Validated the algorithm on a prototype ADC with real hardware data

Demonstrated robustness to arbitrary folding times and threshold agnosticism

First practical demonstration of unlimited sampling in hardware context

Abstract

Following the Unlimited Sampling strategy to alleviate the omnipresent dynamic range barrier, we study the problem of recovering a bandlimited signal from point-wise modulo samples, aiming to connect theoretical guarantees with hardware implementation considerations. Our starting point is a class of non-idealities that we observe in prototyping an unlimited sampling based analog-to-digital converter. To address these non-idealities, we provide a new Fourier domain recovery algorithm. Our approach is validated both in theory and via extensive experiments on our prototype analog-to-digital converter, providing the first demonstration of unlimited sampling for data arising from real hardware, both for the current and previous approaches. Advantages of our algorithm include that it is agnostic to the modulo threshold and it can handle arbitrary folding times. We expect that the end-to-end realization studied in this paper will pave the path for exploring the unlimited sampling methodology in a number of real world applications.