• A.J. Della Penna
  BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York

With increasing demand for acquiring data at high speed with high resolution, more digitizers have become available for this purpose. With the higher speed digitizers becoming faster and faster at these higher data rates with higher resolutions, choosing the proper digitizer for a design, is not just a matter of number of bits. Deciding factors such as jitter, to maximize the ENOB and linearity over the band of interest, and most importantly phase noise should factor into your selection. Does the part you are evaluating match with the data sheet? If not, what is different in your test setup? Your evaluation can only be as good as the equipment you are using to test the device. With the availability of evaluation boards from almost any of the ADC vendors, a more in-depth evaluation can be performed fairly easily. Even the GUI interface is usually included with the evaluation board. So for a small investment on several choices, you can make a side by side comparison and see actual results.