A high speed low power analog-to-digital converter (ADC) using the 0.255m BiCMOS SiGe technology from ST Microelectronics has been developed to meet the specifications of the ALMA project. The main features of this ADC are: 3-bit resolution (8 quantization levels) in Gray code, an input bandwidth from 2 to 4 GHz, 4 GHz sampling rate (and possible operation up to 5 GHz), LVDS standard I/Os and low power dissipation (< 1.4 W). We present in this paper some details of our ADC design and performance results obtained with the ALMA digitizer assembly including one ADC followed by three high speed 1:16 deserializers. ALMA production acceptance tests are briefly described.
View a pdf version of ALMA Memo #532.
Last modified: 2005-10-04
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