Design and Implementation of a single-slope Analog-to-Digital Converter through an FPGA-based Time-to-Digital Converter

The digitization of analog signals is strongly needed in today’s information systems, where the usage of digital electronics has undergone a major expansion. Analog signals need to be digitalized earlier and earlier and in the most compact, robust, and flexible way possible. At the same time, the employment of FPGAs is growing in many fields of applications because of their computing power, in addition to their reconfigurability and low power consumption. In this work the design of a single slope ADC, implemented through the use of an FPGA based TDC is presented. The usage of a device such as the FPGA, to implement the design, brings with it a great advantage of programmable logic devices: high flexibility, due to the possibility of reprogramming it. In addition to the latter, the ADC will be available directly on the board, without the use of dedicated hardware components. Moreover, an analysis of the Nyquist frequency limit is discussed regarding nonuniform sampling ADCs, such as the one presented in this work.