High performance data converters cut power by 30%

A family of 10- and 12-bit, eight-channel (octal) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) from Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) features what’s said to have the industry's lowest power consumption and smallest size. These data converters enable smaller and more energy-efficient medical imaging, wireless communications, military guidance, automatic test equipment and video equipment. The ADS5281 family offers high resolution and sampling speeds of up to 65 million samples per second (MSPS), low noise performance and advanced digital features, which are critical in sensitive imaging applications like portable ultrasound and MRI equipment.

The ADS5281, ADS5282 and ADS5287 ADCs feature power consumption of 30 percent less than competing solutions. At the highest sample rate of 65 MSPS, the ADS5281 family consumes as little as 77mW per channel. With dynamic scaling, at a 30MSPS sample rate, the per-channel power consumption is as low as 48mW per channel.

The ADS5281 family is designed to interface with TI's new octal variable gain amplifier, the VCA8500, which features 0.8 nv/square root Hz input noise at 63mW per channel power consumption. When combined, the ADC and octal amplifier offer a complete medical signal chain solution with better noise performance and a combined power of less than 13 mW per channel at 50MSPS, less than any competing solution on the market today.

The ADS5281 family also features a low-frequency noise suppression mode eliminates the 1/f (Flicker) noise, improving SNR by up to 4.2 dB over a 1-MHz band in baseband and time-domain applications.


Texas Instruments, www.ti.com