Frequency_domain_testing_of_waveform_digitizers.pdfVIP

UNIVERSITY OF TRENTO DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY 38050 Povo – Trento (Italy), Via Sommarive 14 http://www.dit.unitn.it FREQUENCY DOMAIN TESTING OF WAVEFORM DIGITIZERS Dario Petri March 2004 Technical Report # DIT-04-046 . - 1 - Frequency-Domain Testing of Waveform Digitizers Dario Petri, Member, IEEE Abstract. An easy to use, robust and accurate frequency-domain procedure for estimating the spectral performance of waveform digitizers is considered in this paper. Its properties are analyzed and almost unbiased estimators are proposed along with simple but accurate expressions for their variances. Experimental results are presented to validate the proposed analysis. Directions and criteria useful for the design of the test procedure are also included. Keywords: Analog-digital conversion, quantization, frequency domain analysis, discrete Fourier transform. I. INTRODUCTION Due to the high performance of available sinewave sources, modern digitizer testing procedures usually consider a spectrally pure sinewave as input signal. The data sequence provided by the digitizer under test, when fed with a full-scale input, is then processed in order to estimate the quality parameters of such a device. Obviously, the accuracy of the estimated parameters depends on the uncertainties originating both in the employed test set-up and in the numerical estimation procedure. Thus, signal processing algorithms must be carefully applied in order to ensure good estimation accuracy. This is the issue addressed in this paper. A simple yet often sufficiently accurate model for the observed digitizer output data consists in a set of sinewave components embedded in white, or at least weakly-correlated, zero-mean noise that originates inside the dig