High-Rate Transient Data Acquisition with Selective ADC Conversion
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current data acquisition systems face challenges in efficiently handling high sampling rates and accurate timing measurements in applications like particle accelerator experiments and Lidar, where data of interest is brief and requires precise timing accuracy, leading to increased complexity, power consumption, and cost.
Innovation Solution
A data acquisition system that uses an array of sampling circuits, analog storage cells, and an activity detector to temporarily store samples at gigahertz rates, identifying non-zero data before converting it to the digital domain, reducing the conversion rate and storage requirements, and allowing for parallel analog-to-digital converters.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If high sampling rates (gigahertz range) are used to accurately capture collision artifacts, then timing measurement precision is improved, but system complexity and power consumption increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies preliminary action by using sampling circuits to capture and temporarily store analog samples at gigahertz rates before digital conversion. This pre-captures the collision artifacts in analog form during the brief nanosecond window, allowing subsequent processing to focus only on relevant data portions rather than continuously processing all high-rate samples, thereby reducing overall system complexity while maintaining timing precision
Solution Approach 2:
The patent segments the data acquisition process into distinct stages: analog sampling at high rate, activity detection to identify non-zero samples, and selective digital conversion. This segmentation allows the system to maintain high sampling rates for accuracy while reducing the burden on digital processing components by converting only the necessary portions of the signal
2Measurement precision
If high sampling rates are used to capture brief collision artifacts, then data acquisition accuracy is improved, but power consumption increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary analog sampling and storage at high rates, then uses activity detection to identify which stored samples contain collision artifacts. This allows the power-intensive digital conversion process to be applied only to relevant samples rather than all samples, significantly reducing overall power consumption while maintaining data acquisition accuracy
Solution Approach 2:
The patent applies local quality by differentiating between active regions (containing collision artifacts) and inactive regions in the signal. The system concentrates processing resources and power consumption on converting only the active portions of the signal, while ignoring inactive portions, thereby optimizing the balance between accuracy and power usage
3Reliability
If all sampled data is converted to digital domain at high rates, then complete data capture is achieved, but digital storage requirements and processing burden increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts only the relevant portions of the sampled data (non-zero samples indicating collision artifacts) from the full high-rate signal stream. By using activity detection to identify and extract only these meaningful samples for digital conversion, the system maintains complete capture of all collision events while dramatically reducing the quantity of digital data that must be stored and processed
4Reliability
If continuous high-rate digital conversion is performed, then no data is lost, but system cost increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary analog sampling and activity detection before digital conversion, identifying which time windows contain collision artifacts. This allows the design to use multiple parallel analog-to-digital converters that are activated only when activity is detected, rather than requiring a single extremely high-rate converter operating continuously, thereby reducing system cost while maintaining data integrity
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements dynamic operation by enabling multiple analog-to-digital converters to operate in parallel only during periods when collision artifacts are detected. During inactive periods, these converters remain dormant. This dynamic activation strategy maintains complete data capture capability when needed while reducing the overall system cost compared to having all converters operate continuously at maximum rate
Data Source
AI summary
Diverse applications in particle physics experiments and emerging technologies such as Lidar are driving performance increase and cost reduction in giga-hertz sampling-rate high-resolution data conversion. In applications such as these, critical aspects of the data may occur only during relatively short nanosecond portions of observation periods lasting microseconds. Data acquisition architectures that key in on regions of the data containing activity, digitize the data, and provide info to accurately measure the position of the data in time relative to a time reference are described. These architectures may facilitate system implementation and reduce overall system cost.