Detection and Correction Methods for Single Event Effects in Analog to Digital Converters

This paper presents detection and correction methods for single event effects in analog to digital converters. Multi-path ADC based detection method is proposed for single event effects and bit error rate. Two correction schemes are proposed for single event effects based on multi-path ADC structure. Two-path ADC based detection scheme with skip and fill algorithm based correction scheme. Three-path ADC based detection scheme with majority voting based correction scheme. Advantages and limitations of both the methods are presented with simulation results. In particular, the three-path ADC can detect and correct for single event effects independent of repetition rate, magnitude of single event effects and the choice of data converter architecture. In three path ADC technique, the accuracy degradation is less than 1.7 dB or 0.28 bit for the Nyquist bandwidth for single event effects. Bit-Error Rate (BER) is effectively squared for three-path ADC as compared to a conventional ADC.