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Integrators, DAM Switches and Speed

A project log for Multislope ADC

Making the most of non-ideal components in a non-ideal world.

nnniNNNI 05/15/2023 at 22:170 Comments

Another line from The Art of Electronics (3rd Edition) caught my eyes. 

More specifically, it’s easy to show that the ΔV term by itself yields the correct input voltage for a measurement whose duration equals a single clock cycle (i.e., Tmeas = 1/ fclk).

Basically, if the integrator is allowed to charge up for a certain time period and the residue ADC reads the integrator voltage before and after measurement, you can get the original input voltage back using the formula: 

Here, Vin is the input voltage to the integrator, R and C are the integrator resistor and capacitor values, dV is the resolution of the residue ADC and dt is the integration time. 

If we can vary the integrating time correctly, we can measure full scale voltages like 10V with a short integration time (to prevent the integrator from saturating), and small voltages like 1uV by integrating for a longer time. Of course, you can't measure large voltages with a high resolution, so this is a floating-point conversion with a fixed resolution, which in this case is the resolution of the residue ADC. At each point in time, there is a specific input to output "gain", which increases with integration time and therefore "programmable". Of course, this requires knowledge of the input voltage to set the "gain" correctly. 

Wouldn't it be nice to have a way to keep the integrator roughly zero to get a coarse reading, and using the residue ADC to do a fine reading? Oh wait...

That brings us straight back to the multislope! The charge balancing keeps the integrator voltage roughly around zero while providing a count of the charge needed to do so, and the residue ADC reads integrator state before and after charge balancing to provide finer details. 

Now this is not new information, since previous logs already went into depth about how the multislope topology works. I just found this new way of thinking quite interesting. 

Let's consider some numbers. The integrator on the current multislope has a 10K resistor and a 1nF capacitor. The MCP3202 residue ADC has a 12-bit resolution, and with a reference voltage of 3.3V can resolve voltages of 1mV. Assuming a measurement cycle is 20ms (1 PLC), the residue reading has a resolution of 500nV according to the above formula. If the integration time is increased to 200ms (10 PLC), the resolution is improved to 50nV. If the integrating capacitor is reduced to 100pF, the same 500nV resolution can be achieved in 2ms. 

The takeaway is that with faster integration, that is, smaller integrating capacitor, measurements can be sped up with fast charge balancing.

Out of curiosity, I tried using the formula to crunch the numbers for the 34410A, which boasts 4.5 digit resolution in 20us. It's ADC has a 50K input resistor and a 47pF integrating capacitor and a 10-bit ADC referenced to 1V, so a 1mV residue resolution. For an integrating time of 20us, the resolution comes out to 100uV. in the 10V range, that gives a usable reading of 10.000V, which is 4.5 digits. 

There are practical limitations to how fast currents can be switched, and the analog switches used to do the current steering are the limiting factor. The 74HC4053D used in the 34401A meter specifies a worst case switching time of 200ns, which is no good for speed. The 34410A solves this problem using an interesting circuit called a DAM switch, described in US patent 20050024119A1. I assume this circuit was used to overcome the limitations of regular analog switches and could handle the fast switching speeds.

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