IMPROVING SIGNAL -TO- NOISE RATIO WHEN USING FEWER BITS THAN THE NUMBER OF OUTPUT BITS OF AN ANALOG TO DIGITAL CONVERTER

摘要

Improving signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) when using fewer bits than the number of output bits of an ADC as digital representation of the strength of the samples of an input signal (210). In an embodiment, an ADC generates digital values of H bits by sampling an input signal at corresponding time instances. An error signal representing the (H-N) least significant bits of the H-bit digital values is processed to determine respective filtered values, which are respectively added to the corresponding ones of the H-bit digital values. The (H- N) bits of the resulting added values are dropped to generate N bit values. The N bit values thus generated may have improved SNR at least in a band of interest, as desired.