Modified BER Test for SAR ADCs

This paper presents a new post-processing method to estimate the real bit error rate (BER) of successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) based on the conventional test scheme. Conventional testing method acquires BER based on difference between two measured output codes, rather than between a measured output code and its corresponding ideal one. This makes the resulting BER have a wrong trend with increasing sampling speed of ADC. Therefore, this work analyzes the difference between these two cases and proposes a simple post-processing method to obtain a more realistic BER based on the conventional BER test scheme. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed method can effectively obtain the correct BER trend for a SAR ADC.

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