A low power 12-bit ADC for nuclear instrumentation

A low power, successive approximation, analog-to-digital converter (ADC) for low rate, low cost, battery powered applications is described. The ADC is based on a commercial 50 mW successive approximation CMOS device (CS5102). An on-chip self-calibration circuit reduces the inherent differential nonlinearity to 7%. A further reduction of the differential nonlinearity to 0.5% is attained with a four bit Gatti function. The Gatti function is distributed to minimize battery power consumption. All analog functions reside with the ADC while the noisy digital functions reside in the personal computer based histogramming memory. Fiber optic cables carry afl digital information between the ADC and the personal computer based histogramming memory