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251
Note that the currents owing in the resistors are kept constant since the digital input diverts the current either to ground or to the input (virtual ground) of the operational amplier functioning as a current-to-voltage converter.
di 2i
(5.2.1)
where VF S is the DC reference voltage. The basic difference in converters consists in how to vary Vr to determine the binary coefcients di s such that the error |Vx Vr | is minimized.
VFS
N-bit Counter
D = d 1d 2 d N SOC Digital output (Start of conversion) (a) Block diagram 1 : One clock period (f : the clock frequency) c fc
TC,2
TC,3
TC,4
TC,5
TC,6
TC,7
TC,8
TC,9
TC,10
TC,11
Time
1001
1000
0110
(c) A typical variation of the analog input, reference voltage,digital output, and conversion time
252
The sequentially increasing counter output is applied to the N -bit DAC, making its output Vr go up like a staircase as depicted in Fig. 5.2(b). The reference voltage Vr is applied to the input terminal of the comparator and compared against Vx (applied to the + input terminal) by the comparator. The comparator output keeps to be 1 so that the counter will continue to increase normally till Vr exceeds Vx . When Vr Vx , the comparator output will be switched to 0 so that no further clock pulse can increment the counter value and the EOC (end of conversion) signal becomes high to tell other devices that an A/D conversion cycle is completed and the counter value represents the converted (digital) value of the unknown analog voltage Vx . Fig. 5.2(c) shows typical variations of the analog input, reference voltage, digital output, and conversion time. Some features of this converter should be noted: <Advantage> The simple hardware makes the counter ramp ADC inexpensive to implement. <Disadvantages> The conversion time is proportional to the value of Vx . In the worst case where Vx is equal to or greater than the value of the maximum binary number, i.e., Vx (1 2N )VF S , it becomes TC = 2 N / f c (2 N clock periods) (5.2.2)
where f c is the clock frequency and VF S is the full-scale DAC output voltage. The DAC output is not necessarily the closest to Vx , but the smallest just over Vx among the 2 N possible binary numbers.