Enhancing strictly-digital dither through digital signal processing

With the powerful digital signal processing power available today, many traditionally analogue techniques are being re-examined to consider whether processing in the digital domain is preferable. The application of dither is one such technique which has been shown theoretically to benefit from transferring the processing to the digital domain. Strictly-digital dither is more controllable in the sense that it can adapt to the physical converter errors which result in differential linearity and integral linearity errors. This ability is particularly significant if the application is data acquisition (i.e. absolute value, mean, statistics) as opposed to signal acquisition (time history). This paper will show that adding strictly-digital dither is realisable practically and that additional signal processing can further enhance the data acquisition