A survey of A/D-Converter performance evolution

Abstract

This paper presents the performance evolution over time for monolithic ADC implementations reported in scientific publications. The survey is based on an exhaustive search of IEEE journals and conferences central to the field from 1974 to 2010 and thus represents a near-exhaustive survey of reported scientific ADC data. Based on the full set of historical data, empirically observed evolution trends are extracted. The trends are used to predict the state-of-the-art specifications of future ADCs and also form a valuable reference and complement to theoretical performance limits derived in other works.