Texas Instruments’ 14bit ADC

Texas Instruments, the American electronics company which makes and designs semiconductors, has recently achieved the fastest 14bit ADC ever, with “one that works at 3Gsample/s, delivering an instantaneous 1.5GHz-per-channel bandwidth, enabling engineers to implement wide-band in-phase and quadrature-component receivers beyond 2.5 GHz,” said the company.

The dual-channel ADC32RF45 can be used for direct RF signal conversion up to 4GHz.

said Texas Instruments.

The first in a new data converter family, it eliminates up to four intermediate-frequency down-conversion stages in multi-band receivers.

For multi-band digital down-conversion, each and every analog to digital converter is capable of being connected to a dual-band DDC, or digital down-converter, with up to three autonomous, 16-bit numerically controlled oscillators, or NCOs, per digital down-converter for phase-coherent frequency hopping. The analog to digital converter is equipped with RMS power detectors and front-end peak with alarms to support external automatic gain control, or AGC, algorithms. Various applications are expected for this analog to digital converter, such as in software-defined radio, radar, test, wireless communication, measurement, radio astronomy, defense, and aerospace.

Noise-spectral density of -155dBFS/Hz, is claimed, as is a signal-to-noise ratio of 58.5dB with 1.8GHz on the input.

said Steve Bush from Electronics Weekly.

Volume production is planned for the third quarter of 2016 10x10mm 72pin QFN packaging. There is an evaluation kit, and the firm suggest its ADC be used alongside the LMH3404 7GHz dual-channel differential amplifier, LMX2592 9.8GHz frequency synthesizer and LMK04828 clock-jitters cleaner. In addition, the 66AK2L06 processor offers an alternative to FPGAs.

added Texas Instruments.

The device was on display at the International Microwave Symposium in San Francisco in May.