System-driven metrics for the design and adaptation of analog to digital converters

In this paper, we review some recent advances in the design of ADCs that exploit system-driven metrics, such as the bit-error rate in a communication link, or mutual information in a scheme employing forward error correction. We show, for example, that ADCs can be designed that maximize the information rate between the quantized output of the channel and the input to the channel for communication links with intersymbol-interference and additive noise. These ADCs dramatically outper-form (in terms of achievable information rates) traditional ADC design methods that are based on fixed uniform quantization. Architectures are also developed for ADCs such that system-metrics can be used to dynamically adapt the structure of the ADC to optimize application meaningful criteria, such as bit-error rate for communication over intersymbol interference links.