Category: Signal Processing

How to Connect an ADC to an FPGA

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What is an Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC)

The ADC converters translate analog electrical signals, usually the voltage amplitude, into a sequence of discrete values (integer number) for data processing purposes. The bit resolution of the analog to digital conversion determines the magnitude of the quantization error. The number of discrete levels depends on the number of ADC bit resolution. For an N-bit ADC, the number of discrete possible values is 2^N.

For example, for 8-bit ADC the input signal is discretized in 2^8=256 different values.

You can find a complete description of ADC here:

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Binary Number Representation

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In this post, we want to give an overview to binary number representation for negative numbers. Will be review three different representations for the negative number.

To understand binary numbers, we can start recalling elementary school math.

When we first learned about numbers in the decimal system, the number where organized into columns:

 



  H | T | O    4 | 3 | 2


 


such that


    

  • “H” is the hundreds column,
    • 

  • “T” is the tens column,
    • 

  • “O” is the ones column.
    • 

  • 



So the number “432” is 4-hundreds plus 3-tens plus 2-ones.

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