Members

Ben Magstadt - Senior Electrical Engineering - btm573@iastate.edu
Luke Goetzke - Senior Electrical Engineering - lgoetzke@iastate.edu
Tao Chen - Senior Electrical Engineering - taoc@iastate.edu

Introduction

There are increasingly more systems on a chip that have multiple embedded Analog to Digital Converters and Digital to Analog Converters. The performance of a system generally comes down to the performance of these ADCs and DACs. This gives rise for the need of accurate testing methods of these two components. Currently the ADCs and DACs are tested separately. This is time consuming and requires already confirmed reliable and costly equipment to characterize the performance of the ADCs and DACs. Recently, it has been theoretically shown through simulations that by using proper digital signal processing based test algorithms, it is possible to simultaneous co-test both an ADC and DAC that are in a DAC-ADC pair. This is made possible by several different hardware and algorithmic processes that help to determine the imperfections of both the ADC and DAC separately. This project will put this theoretical process to test by creating a PCB operating environment for a 16-bit DAC-ADC pair. The goal of the project will then be to be able to collect accurate data. Ultimately this data will help verify that the testing method will work with similar accuracy to traditional testing methods, and can replace the current slow and costly testing methods. The block diagram of the project can be seen below.