On 9/20/2016 3:55 PM, David MacMahon wrote:

Hi Adam,

A little bit of noise (a step or several rms) is a cure for many ADC ills, and is widely practiced under the term "dithering". It's usually nicest if the dithering waveform can be arranged to fall outside the signal band of interest (yet still have reasonably wide bandwidth in its own right), but not essential.

In the early days of CDs the advent of effective dithering saved the format from probable (IMO) doom, arising from the nasty forms of distortion that accrued from signal levels that exercised only the few
lowest order bits of the ADCs.

Dana Whitlow
Arecibo Observatory


Hi, Adam,

I haven't looked at the spectral content of a terminated input before so I don’t have any comparative results, but I think the spikes you are seeing are caused by mismatched gains and/or offsets of the ADC’s interleaved cores (I think there are a total of 8 cores, also called "branches" in the datasheet). Have you tried sampling band limited noise (e.g. low pass at Fs/20)? I think the severity of the spikes will be less in the presence of a signal. In the worst case you will have to ignore the 8 frequency channels with these spikes, but you might be able to improve things by tweaking the coarse gain and/or fine gain registers in the ADC.

HTH,
Dave

On Sep 20, 2016, at 11:46 AM, Schoenwald, Adam (GSFC-564.0)[AS and D, Inc.] <adam.schoenw...@nasa.gov <mailto:adam.schoenw...@nasa.gov>> wrote:

Hi All,
I have a question regarding the ADC16x250-8 coax rev 2 running in demux by 4 mode. When I terminate the inputs with a 50 ohm connector and collect data using a basic snapshot block design, I get a little bit of noise on the LSB. I export the data to a csv file and find that it is a collection of 0’s and -1’s, indicating that the level being converted by the adc is sitting between these two values and there is some sort of internal noise causing us to jump between values. What is alarming is that when I collected 2^18 samples and run spectral analysis I see large spikes at intervals of FS/16 (See Attached, pwelch(x,1024,256,[],800)). I am running the ADC at 800MHZ and the FPGA at 200MHZ. I am using one of the more recent casper builds after the bitslipping commit on Mar 25^th . I also tried to use the ruby script located athttps://github.com/jack-h/casper_adc16/tree/master/ruby/lib. I run the bof file with “adc16_init.rb --reg=0x3a=0x0202,0x3b=0x0202 -d 4 roach_ip boffile”, where I change the ic inputs. We only connected 8 of the 16 coax cables to the board and I had to switch off the default.
Has anyone else had a similar experience or ideas?
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Adam Schoenwald
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<adc16_terminated.png>


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