Properly evaluating ADCs for harsh conditions - Story
June 27, 2022High-precision analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are an integral part of many satellites and other systems used in space. It is important to understand how such devices respond in the harsh environment of space, where heavy ions may repeatedly strike. A detection algorithm can adequately identify single-event effects (SEE) – namely, single-event transients (SET) and single-event functional interrupts (SEFI) – in low-speed precision SAR [successive approximation register] ADCs without user-configurable registers. This information can be used to adequately determine the suitability of an ADC for space applications.