Rainbow Electronics ADC12L038 - Manual (Page 32)

Application Hints
(Continued)
12 0 THE CALIBRATION CYCLE
A calibration cycle needs to be started after the power sup-
plies reference and clock have been given enough time to
stabilize after initial turn on During the calibration cycle cor-
rection values are determined for the offset voltage of the
sampled data comparator and any linearity and gain errors
These values are stored in internal RAM and used during an
analog-to-digital conversion to bring the overall full-scale
offset and linearity errors down to the specified limits Full-
scale error typically changes
g 0 4 LSB over temperature
and linearity error changes even less therefore it should be
necessary to go through the calibration cycle only once af-
ter power up if the Power Supply Voltage and the ambient
temperature do not change significantly (see the curves in
the Typical Performance Characteristics)
13 0 THE AUTO-ZERO CYCLE
To correct for any change in the zero (offset) error of the
A D the auto-zero cycle can be used It may be necessary
to do an auto-zero cycle whenever the ambient temperature
or the power supply voltage change significantly (See the
curves titled ‘‘Zero Error Change vs Ambient Temperature’’
and ‘‘Zero Error Change vs Supply Voltage’’ in the Typical
Performance Characteristics )
14 0 DYNAMIC PERFORMANCE
Many applications require the A D converter to digitize AC
signals but the standard DC integral and differential nonlin-
earity specifications will not accurately predict the A D con-
verter’s performance with AC input signals The important
specifications for AC applications reflect the converter’s
ability to digitize AC signals without significant spectral er-
rors and without adding noise to the digitized signal Dynam-
ic characteristics such as signal-to-noise (S N) signal-to-
noise a distortion ratio (S (N a D)) effective bits full pow-
er bandwidth aperture time and aperture jitter are quantita-
tive measures of the A D converter’s capability
An A D converter’s AC performance can be measured us-
ing Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) methods A sinusoidal
waveform is applied to the A D converter’s input and the
transform is then performed on the digitized waveform
S (N a D) and S N are calculated from the resulting FFT
data and a spectral plot may also be obtained
The A D converter’s noise and distortion levels will change
with the frequency of the input signal with more distortion
and noise occurring at higher signal frequencies This can
be seen in the S (N a D) versus frequency curves These
curves will also give an indication of the full power band-
width (the frequency at which the S (N a D) or S N drops
3 dB)
Effective number of bits can also be useful in describing the
A D’s noise performance An ideal A D converter will have
some amount of quantization noise determined by its reso-
lution which will yield an optimum S N ratio given by the
following equation
S N e (6 02 c n a 1 8) dB
where n is the A D’s resolution in bits
The effective bits of a real A D converter therefore can be
found by
n(effective) e
S N(dB) b 1 8
6 02
As an example this device with a g 2 5V 10 kHz sine wave
input signal will typically have a S N of 78 dB which is
equivalent to 12 6 effective bits
32