Tim 'mithro' Ansell
@Simi - Assume I know nothing about ADC design and just want to understand when I should be using this ADC in one or two sentences (verse when another option would be better?).
Really, just looking for something high level enough that I can "pattern match" against people who might be doing projects that could potentially benefit from your design and I should send them your way.
Summary from my thesis:
"The most commonly used ADCs are so-called Nyquist ADCs, which operate at a fixed sampling frequency and thus output equidistant samples [4,5]. However, certain signal groups exhibit significant variations only within short time intervals. This is particularly relevant in bio-signal acquisition and processing, where sparse signals are observed in electrocardiograms (ECGs) and electroencephalograms (EEGs). According to the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, the sampling rate of a Nyquist ADC is determined by the highest frequency component during these transient changes [6]. This results in an unnecessarily excessive number of samples in minimal signal variation time intervals, leading to higher power consumption in data processing and transmission [7].
However, optimizing data handling and energy consumption is crucial for batterypowered, wireless, and wearable devices, such as fitness trackers, medical sensors, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices [8]. Event-based ADCs offer a promising solution by generating data points only when the signal exceeds a predefined voltage threshold [9–11]. The reduced data samples are strongly tied to savings in energy consumption, storage resources and computational effort [12]. In [13, Fig. 13], it is demonstrated that event-based ADCs consume a lot less power than the Nyquist ADC-based counterpart. As demonstrated in this work, adaptively adjusting these voltage thresholds further enhances efficiency [14]."
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