This presentation covers the architecture details for the two most common types of precision analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) that are widely used in a variety of consumer, automotive and industrial applications.

While SAR ADCs are based on a traditional binary search algorithm, Delta-Sigma ADCs employ different configurations of complicated digital filtering to enhance the overall resolution of the ADC. Such differences in architectures lead to differences in specifications and application use cases between the two ADC types. This presentation will cover some key ADC specifications like noise, total unadjusted error, etc. and provide a comparative explanation for these specifications. Specific details related to achieving the best performance by properly driving each ADC architecture will also be covered.