Using Multisines to Measure State-of-the-Art Analog-to-Digital Converters

Multisines have proven to be very useful for fast and accurate measurements, particularly when studying the nonlinear behavior of analog devices under test. This paper will deal with some problems that can arise when designing experiments for measuring state-of-the-art analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) with multisines. Special care has been taken to the measurement setup, particularly with the generation and verification of the test signals. The verification of the test signals requires either a more performant ADC or alternative measurement methods such as a spectrum analyzer. By means of real measurement examples, it is shown that most existing techniques used for analog measurements can be reused after an adaptation to the new proposed measurement setup. It will, for example, be shown that the loss of information introduced by using a spectrum analyzer leads to bounds onto the nonlinear distortions instead of the absolute value