A flexible ADC approach for mixed-signal SoC platforms

Time-to-market pressure and increased design complexity has created what is called a "design gap" in the design of systems-on-chip (SoC). As a solution to that problem the platform-based design (PBD), based on the design-reuse methodology, has been proposed, and successfully applied to digital systems. However, nowadays, the analog part of SoC does not take advantage of PBD and therefore dominates the overall design time, cost and risk. In this paper we propose a mixed-signal FPGA (FPMA) platform as a solution to the problems described above. Specifically, we address the feasibility of a flexible reprogrammable/reconfigurable ADC platform based on the pipelined architecture. We discuss the programmability issues with respect to the performance-flexibility trade-offs, we justify our decisions and we demonstrate several possible ADC architectures.