Technical Support

Texas Instruments (TI) today announced the industry's fastest 12-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC). The RF sampling ADC12J4000 not only has a clock rate of up to 4 GSPS, supports data conversion rates of up to 8Gbps JEDEC JESD204B serial interface standard, and consumes 50% less power than competitive products in its class. In addition, its size of only 10 mm × 10 mm, is also the smallest IC in its class. ADC12J4000 can be used for measurement and test, wireless and defense applications, such as spectrum analyzers, weapons and ammunition, digital pre-distortion feedback and radar.

The ADC12J4000 integrates TI's existing billion-sample ADC intellectual property (IP) with low-power digital processing blocks to provide digital filtering and down-conversion capabilities. This helps system designers sample large blocks of spectrum under RF and downconvert them to quadrature in the digital domain to reduce signal distortion. Because the ADC12J4000 uses the JESD204B serial interface standard, it can not only output data over 1 to 8 channels, depending on the extraction and link rate settings, but also simplifies the layout.

Key benefits:

- Wideband sampling: provides RF sampling capabilities that support input bandwidths in excess of 3 GHz;

- Lowest power consumption: only 1.9 W, 50% lower than competitive devices;

- Unique multi-band summation: Performs some external signal conditioning normally handled by FPGAs at 4/8/10/16/20/32 overall extraction multiples, which enables approximately 80dB of attenuation at 80% bandwidth, 44dB of attenuation at 85% bandwidth, and 24dB of attenuation at 90% bandwidth, enabling system designers to filter higher frequency signals for their applications by Reducing data rates;

- Highly flexible signal bandwidth: Provides a low noise to power ratio of 48.5 dB with a noise floor of -149 dBFS/Hz and high linearity to or beyond 3 GHz. These features help system design solutions to sample at higher frequencies;

- RF Sampling Analog Front End: The pin-compatible 4GSPS ultra-broadband RF sampling LM15851 analog front end (AFE) requires no export license.

Tools and support to accelerate design

TI offers evaluation boards (EVM) to accelerate the performance of the latest ADCs, with the ADC12J4000EVM and LM15851EVM.

System designers can pair the ADC12J4000EVM, which includes the LMK04828 JESD204B clock jitter eliminator and LMX2581 ultra-low noise broadband frequency synthesizer, among others, with the TSW14J56EVM JESD204B solution platform to fully evaluate ADC12J4000 performance. ADC12J4000EVM with When used in conjunction with the TSW14J56EVM, complex modulated signals can be analyzed and subsequently analyzed using TI's easy-to-use, high-speed data converter professional software.

In addition, TI offers a variety of free tools and support to accelerate development with the ADC12J4000, including IBIS models for verifying board signal integrity requirements and a topology calculator for op amp to ADC circuits (supporting anti-alias filter design and circuit topology).

Packaging

The ADC12J4000 is available now in a 68-pin, 10 mm × 10 mm QFN package that supports a wide range of industrial ambient temperatures from -40C to +85C.

The pin-compatible 2,700MSPS ADC12J2700 and 1,600MSPS ADC12J1600 will be available in prototype form in Q1 2014 and will be in volume production in Q3 2014.