Help me deciding topic of PhD related to ADC design

[Usman Hai]

help in deciding phd topic

Hi all,
it sounds foolish to ask about my topic of PhD, but I need some little comments from senior guys. I am doing some research in ADC area for some months. I just need to hear from you that what could be new area in ADC design which you can foresee for near future. I know now digitally assisted ADC are popular, and I know there are many issues now a days which could lead to full PhD thesis, but if you could give your personal views that if were asked to start PhD in some specific area of ADC what you will choose and why?
I know its a general topic but who knows your few lines will change my (or someone else) course of phd.
Thanks
/Noman Hai

 

[Btrend]

deciding on a phd

In my opinion,
1) high resolution with high bandwidth ADC will be required in the future .
2) low power is also needed.
The above conditions are contrary, but if you can push these limits furter , ur works are definitely invaluable.

 

[ch1k0]

You chose what ?

 

[Usman Hai]

low power 12 bit pipelined adc

 

[rfsystem]

Please do not try to replicate actual topics from industrial engineering.


Try to figure out where for instance is the fundamental power limit for ADC conversion is. I will give you an example: There is this crasy number

"Figure of Merit"

which is the energy used for each conversion step. But the number of steps is

2^ENOB

If you have a pipeline, a sucessive approximation you need a little more than ENOB steps.

Make a critic that this is an arbitray number and nothing more than advertisement mood.

Or another topic. Figure out why there is a very low jitter requirement for an ADC but a mixer with the same spec has a noise floor which is 10's of dB better.

Or complete calibration of everything: Gain, Offset, Nonlinearity, Interleave Timing, Frequency Response Mismatch ....

 

[dineshbabumm]

In Pipelined ADC you can try OTA sharing and reduce power at the same time try and increase the bandwidth.. That could be one good project.. Try to figure out some problem statement in this..