High Resolution Large Scale ADC. Case study of an N bit per Volt ADC Implemented using FPAA and FPGA Applied for Precision Altimetery

Abstract

Positioning is a hot topic since there is no such system capable of providing accurate position estimation for all environmental cases. This paper treats a new method for the estimation of the altitude for the case of precision vertical displacement. This paper also emphasizes a new analog-to-digital converter (ADC) architecture called N bit per Volt which is a high-resolution large-scale ADC based on a hybridization of analog and digital reconfigurable targets and an analog pressure sensor. It is considered in this document the case of the implementation using the reconfigurable couple FPAA-FPGA capable of processing an input range of 0-4V for a precision of 12 bit and a quantum of 244 uV with a conversion time equal to 31 ADC clock cycles performing a conversion rate of 838.7 kSPs. The solution could find applications on the industrial fields dealing with robotized systems where the ADC could find several applications dealing with large scale analog sensors.