Analog-to-Digital Conversion Impacted by Reduced Power Supply:
Most signals that exist in the world are analog and cover a continuous range of amplitude values. However, the computer systems that process these signals are binary digital systems. Current synchronous analog-to-digital converters capture analog signals by sampling the amplitude at precise times synchronized to a system clock. The amplitude of the analog signal is captured as a digital value represented as an increment of voltage. The problem with this is that power supply voltages are being reduced with each generation of technology. The lower voltage means that each signal processed must be represented by a smaller increment of voltage. High-resolution conversion between analog and digital signals using lower power supply voltages will be increasingly important as low power circuits become increasingly common.
Time Encoding Improves Analog-to-Digital Conversion:
This invention is a method that uses time encoding to digitize an analog signal and also uses non-linear decoding methods to recover the input signal. This allows the system to apply to both analog to digital conversion and digital to analog conversion. A time encoding machine (TEM) receives an input signal and generates an asynchronous set of binary transitions that are related to the amplitude of the input. The TEM is a circuit or process, which maps amplitude into time information. A time decoding machine can take the transition time data from a TEM and process the transition time data to accurately recover the input signal.
