The PRO1 ASIC for Fast Wilkinson Encoding

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.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figure