Quantization Noise Mitigation via Parallel ADCs

In systems with parallel analogue-to-digital converters (ADC), diversity combining can improve the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the digitised signal. We consider a novel architecture, where the parallel ADCs operate on differently attenuated signals, in conjunction with maximal ratio combining and gain weighted combining. Both schemes reduce the effective quantization noise and provide significant SNR improvements over a single ADC and signal averaging, which takes the unweighted average of the ADC output signals. The key to achieving these SNR gains is to carefully select branch attenuations that lead to negative correlation of the quantization noise across branches.