Analog to digital converter

A compact analog-to-digital converter (ADC) system suitable for high-resolution gamma-ray detectors has been developed around the Burr Brown PCM78P 16-b audio ADC. An associated application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), handling four ADCs, provides sliding scale circuitry, lower threshold adjustment, channel number identification, and zero suppression. The conversion time is 4.5 mu s, and the differential nonlinearity, for 13-b resolution, is less than +or-0.8%. >