Adaptive Parallel Combining (APC™) for Analog-to-Digital Conversion

Adaptive Parallel Combining, Improving Analog-to-Digital Conversion

Innovation Digital’s patented architecture and signal processing technologies maximize digitizer resolution (SNR and SFDR) over an extremely wide input amplitude range by providing instantaneous automatic gain control via Adaptive Parallel Combining (APC™). APC™ uses a parallel array of analog-to-digital converters, each with a different level of amplification. The approach provides instantaneous automatic gain management by effectively adjusting the signal gain to use the full dynamic range of the ADC.

Example: Using four ADCs, each with a 12 dB difference in gain, will provide up to a 48 dB improvement in SNR and SFDR with the ability to immediately respond to the appearance of high-level signals without overloading the digitizer.

This approach uses digital filtering that is adaptively optimized to provide gain and phase matching to provide high-resolution signal reconstruction by coherently combining samples from one or more converters. As the signal level increases, only samples from those converters that are operating in their linear input range are used, a decision which is made on a sample-by-sample basis to instantly prevent overloading the digitizer.