An efficient trimming algorithm for A/D converters

An efficient trimming algorithm is developed for analog-to-digital converters in a production environment. The proposed algorithm fully utilizes the information obtained from the measurements in the trimming process and has much better performance than the trimming algorithms based on the popular binary search or linear search. It is shown that the new searching algorithm can improve the searching efficiency by over 93% over the traditional linear search in the worst-case comparison, and by over 70% on the average. Furthermore, the new approach has a decisive advantage over the binary search method because the linearity measurements have inherent noise contents. The proposed algorithm has been implemented in a production environment and has achieved the desired efficiency