Compressive sampling-based strategy for enhancing ADCs resolution

Abstract The paper deals with the problem of simultaneously enhancing both horizontal and vertical resolution of analog-to-digital converters, with specific regard to low-cost conversion systems. To this aim, the authors propose the combined exploitation of a suitable Compressive Sampling (CS) approach and a proper digital signal processing stage. In particular, starting from a reduced number of digitized samples, the proposed CS-based sampling approach allows to recover an oversampled version of the input signal, whose spectral content is properly shaped to reject the most of in-band noise. The successive processing stage, implementing a low-pass filter, is mandated to drastically attenuate out-of-band noise components. Tests carried out on an actual microcontroller (namely, PIC32MX360L512 by Microchip) evidence the promising performance of the proposed sampling strategy. Results obtained either on single tone or multisine signals highlight a gain up to 3.5 bits in vertical resolution, while the sample rate increases 50 times with respect to the actual one adopted to randomly sample the input signal of interest.