A Quantising Encoder

A device is described that converts voltages to digital form by means of a strategy basically faster than that used in the conventional trial encoder. A voltage corresponding to the contents of a 2n-bit register is obtained from the output of the digital-voltage decoder. The error between this voltage and the input voltage is quantized to the nearest power of two and subtracted from the contents of the register. Each time this process is repeated, the error is diminished. In all, n repetitions of the process are required to complete the encoding. An encoder operating according to this strategy has been built and makes a complete 8-bit conversion in 4, ¿sec.