Are there any manufacturers of floating point ADCs?
There seems to be a lot of literature on floating point ADCs, but I couldn't find one on Analog Devices or Texas Instruments.
What I am trying to get is a ADC with a 10^4 precision for voltage from 1mV to 10V – needing 27 bit (Min) ADC, which TI does have – but at very low frequencies than required.
And I am also trying to avoid using logarithmic amplifiers.
Any suggestions and guidance are highly appreciated…
Electronic – Floating point ADC
adc
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Best Answer
One approach is to use two converters in parallel, with different fixed-gain amplifiers for each. You use software to combine the two sets of samples into a single floating-point stream.
For example, you could have two 24-bit converters, one with a 10V full scale range and the other with a 1V full scale range. When the first one indicates that the signal is less than 1V, use the output of the second one. The software uses the outputs of both converters where the ranges overlap to maintain an accurate relative scaling factor between them.
The trick is to make sure the second converter (and its amplifier) recovers quickly from saturation when the signal goes outside its range. If the saturation characteristics are well-known, the software can help compensate for them.