Application Based Comparison of Different Analog to Digital Converter Architectures

A review study of the most popular type of analog to digital converters-successive approximations, flash, pipelined and sigma-delta has been performed in this paper. The paper elaborates the fundamental operating principles of these architectures and the sources of error experienced in each of these architectures. Further, design considerations and implications, for each architecture, have been put forth. An application based comparison has also been drawn for these architectures with the help of examples. Over the last few decades, digital computing power has exponentially increased at ever smaller, incremental costs. With this powerful abundance, many applications formerly performed with analog are being performed in the digital realm real-world applications are still analog.