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Application of the Kalman Filter in Linearity Testing of Analog-to-Digital Converters

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Abstract

This work introduces application of the Kalman Filter in linearity test of Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs). The Kalman Filter can be used to suppress errors in the histogram counts, based on characteristics of the test environment and the device under test, and achieve high accuracy within short test time. In this paper, appropriate system and noise models, and a corresponding form of the Kalman Filter are developed, while all necessary parameters are obtained from experimental measurements. Simulation and experiment results show that the INL k test errors are reduced by more than 50% by applying the proposed method. Consequently, this method can achieve desired accuracy with significantly fewer samples as compared to the conventional algorithm, and shorten the linearity test time by a factor of four or higher. This method is valuable for effectively reducing the production test time and cost for ADCs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Power Integrations, Inc., San Jose, CA, 95138, USA

    Le Jin

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  1. Le Jin
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Correspondence to Le Jin.

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Responsible Editor: K.-T. Cheng

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Jin, L. Application of the Kalman Filter in Linearity Testing of Analog-to-Digital Converters. J Electron Test 27, 163–175 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10836-011-5196-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10836-011-5196-9

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