IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: ANALOG AND DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 47, NO.
2, FEBRUARY 2000 151
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1057-7130/00$10.00 © 2000 IEEE
Neural-Network Based Analog-Circuit Fault Diagnosis
Using Wavelet Transform as Preprocessor
Mehran Aminian and Farzan Aminian
Abstract—We have developed an analog-circuit fault diagnostic system
based on backpropagation neural networks using wavelet decomposition,
principal component analysis, and data normalization as preprocessors.
The proposed system has the capability to detect and identify faulty com-
ponents in an analog electronic circuit by analyzing its impulse response.
Using wavelet decomposition to preprocess the impulse response drastically
reduces the number of inputs to the neural network, simplifying its archi-
tecture and minimizing its training and processing time. The second pre-
processing by principal component analysis can further reduce the dimen-
sionality of the input space and/or select input features that minimize diag-
nostic errors. Input normalization removes large dynamic variances over
one or more dimensions in input space, which tend to obscure the relevant
data fed to the neural network. A comparison of our work with [1], which
also employs backpropagation neural networks, reveals that our system re-
quires a much smaller network and performs significantly better in fault
diagnosis of analog circuits due to our proposed preprocessing techniques.
Index Terms—Analog circuits, electronic circuits, fault diagnosis, neural
networks, wavelet transform.
I. INTRODUCTION
Fault diagnosis in digital electronic circuits has been successfully de-
veloped to the point of automation. However, the process of developing
test strategies for analog circuits still relies heavily on the engineer’s
experience and intuition. This requires the engineer to have some de-
tailed knowledge of the circuit’s operational characteristics and expe-
rience in developing test strategies. As a result, analog fault detection
and identification is still an iterative and time-consuming process. The
current state in electronic circuit manufacturing has introduced analog
and analog/digital hybrid circuits, where the total circuit under test is
large. As a result, there is an urgent need to find a systematic approach
to automate the fault diagnostic process in these circuits where intu-
ition and experience may no longer be sufficient [2], [3].
The engineering community began to look into analog test problems
in the mid 1970’s, since analog systems were among the most unreli-
able and least testable systems. As a result, many works appeared in
the literature and analog fault diagnosis became an active area of re-
search. During the past few years, there has been significant research on
analog fault diagnosis at the system, board, and chip level [1], [3]–[5].
A survey of the research conducted in this area clearly indicates that
analog fault diagnosis is complicated due to the poor fault models, com-
ponent tolerances, and nonlinearity issues. These difficulties make the
application of neural networks to these problems very appealing. In
this approach, all the faults are modeled by a unique set of features
(signatures) that the network learns during the training phase. These
features, together with the associated fault classes, are presented to the
network as input–output pairs. The network is then allowed to adjust
its weight and bias parameters to learn the desired input–output rela-
tionship. Next, the network is presented with a set of features as input
during the testing phase and determines the fault class. This is called
generalization, where the network predicts the fault class based on the
knowledge acquired during the training phase. Fault diagnosis based on
Manuscript received December 1998; revised September 1999. This paper
was recommended by Associate Editor P. Thiran.
M. Aminian is with St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, TX 78228 USA.
F. Aminian is with Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212 USA.
Publisher Item Identifier S 1057-7130(00)01464-6.
152 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: ANALOG AND DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 47, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2000
neural networks bypasses the difficulties associated with analog fault
diagnosis described earlier, since no physical models of the faults or
tolerance problems are required. Instead, the faulty circuit is simulated
or built and the appropriate features associated with the fault under con-
sideration are extracted from the circuit’s output(s).
There are three recent works that discuss applications of neural net-
works to analog fault diagnosis [1], [2], [6]. Among these, [2] is a
very introductory work that mainly discusses the potential of neural
networks in analog system test development. Reference [1] applies
neural networks to fault diagnosis of linear circuits without any prepro-
cessing of the circuit’s impulse response. This can lead to large neural
network architectures even for relatively small circuits. For a larger
circuit, the authors attempt two ambiguity groups to keep the clas-
sification problem and neural network size manageable. In this case,
each ambiguity group is assumed to be the collection of seven to eight
faulty components. Even though faults can be indistinguishable if they
create similar outputs, it is possible to further break down the ambi-
guity groups in this reference through appropriate preprocessing of the
circuit’s output(s) as shown later. The work in [6] also does not involve
preprocessing to reduce the number of input features to a manageable
size. Feature selection is performed in frequency domain and involves
a significant number of features, even for a small circuit. Moreover, the
selection process in the authors’ approach requires significant experi-
ence and intuition about circuit’s operational characteristics.
Neural-network based fault diagnosis is applicable to analog circuits
as long as the faults under consideration result in classes which can be
separated from each other and the no-fault class by means of appro-
priate features. Within the context of this work, appropriate features
refer to the impulse response of the electronic circuit preprocessed by
wavelet decomposition, principal component analysis (PCA), and nor-
malization. We will show later that through these preprocessing steps,
we can significantly reduce the number of inputs and select appro-
priate features such that the neural network architecture required for
fault diagnosis has a minimal size. In this work, we will concentrate
on faults resulting from components having values out of the range al-
lowed by component tolerances so that we can compare our results with
[1]. However, our proposed system is capable of identifying any fault
in any analog circuit which can be represented by a unique signature.
Comparison of our work with [1] in a later section clearly indicates
the importance of preprocessing the output of an analog circuit in: 1)
significantly reducing the size and, therefore, the training time of the
neural network and 2) improving the performance of the neural net-
work in fault diagnosis.
The material in this brief is arranged in the following order. In Sec-
tions II and III, we briefly review our proposed preprocessing tech-
niques for analog-circuit fault diagnosis and cover the sample circuits
and faults considered in this work. Section IV discusses the selection of
wavelet coefficients as features to train and test the neural network, and
Section V covers the results. We will present our conclusion in Section
VI.
II. PROCESSING OF NEURAL NETWORK INPUTS
A. Wavelet Transform as a Preprocessor
Discrete (dyatic) wavelet analysis refers to the decomposition
of a signal into the so-called approximations and details. This is
accomplished using shifted and scaled versions of the so-called
original (mother) wavelet as
x
( )= p1a x0b : (1)
a;b
a tinct features (wavelet coefficients) across fault classes, thus providing
Fig. 1. Hierarchial decomposition of a signal into approximations and details.
Note that each approximation or detail component is further decomposed into its
own approximation and detail levels. Here, only two levels of decompositions
are shown. Also shown is the downsampling effect in wavelet analysis.
In this equation, a and b define the degree of scaling and shifting of
the mother wavelet (x) ; respectively. The coefficients of expansion
C (a; b) for a particular signal can be expressed as
C (a; b) = h a;b x
( )
I (x)i = p 1
I (x) x 0 b dx: (2)
a a
These coefficients give a measure of how closely correlated the mod-
ified mother wavelet [in (1)] is with the input signal. In (2), I (x) rep-
resents the signal and the integration is performed over all possible x
values. Wavelet analysis in its discrete (dyatic) form assumes a = 2j
and b = k2j = ka; where (j; k) 2 Z 2 : Approximations and details
mentioned earlier correspond to high-scale (low-frequency) and low-
scale (high-frequency) components of a signal, respectively. Therefore,
wavelet decomposition can be considered a process that generates a
family of hierarchically organized low- and high-frequency compo-
nents of a signal. At each level, say j; one can construct the approx-
imation Aj and detail Dj of the original signal. The block diagram of
this decomposition is shown in Fig. 1. One can, therefore, consider ap-
proximation and detail as low- and high-pass filter operations on the
original signal, respectively.
In applying wavelet analysis to sampled signals, one needs to per-
form the downsampling operation after each level of decomposition to
preserve the number of data points in the original signal. This simply
means to include every other data point in the signal components (ap-
proximation and detail). Consequently, the number of data points in
the components at level j approximation or detail will be reduced by a
factor of two compared to the corresponding number of data points at
level (j 0 1): This can be effectively used to extract optimal features
for neural network training as explained later. The process of down-
sampling is also shown in Fig. 1.
Several families of wavelets are proven to be useful in signal and
image processing. These families include Haar, Daubechies, Biorthog-
onal, Coiflets, Symlets, Morlet, Mexican Hat, Meyer, etc. Each of these
wavelets have properties that make them suitable for certain applica-
tions [7]. For example, the wavelet Biorthogonal 3.7, which belongs
to Biorthogonal family of wavelets, is popular in image processing,
and the Mexican Hat wavelet has been applied to rotation-invariant
pattern recognition [8]. The proper choice of the mother wavelet for
preprocessing the analog circuit’s output(s) is crucial for optimal de-
sign of the fault diagnostic system. In this work, we have used the first
member of Daubechies family of wavelets, also known as Haar, shown
in Fig. 2 for the circuits under test. This choice was made after sev-
eral wavelet functions were examined as possible candidates for the
mother wavelet. After analyzing the wavelet coefficients generated by
these wavelet functions, it was determined that Haar gave the most dis-
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: ANALOG AND DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 47, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2000
Fig. 2. The mother wavelet used in our study. This is the first member of the
Daubechies family of wavelets, also known as Haar.
optimal features for neural network training. This issue is discussed
further in Section IV.
As mentioned before, the main advantage of using wavelet transform
is to reduce the number of inputs to the neural network. This is accom-
plished by the downsampling operation performed in wavelet analysis,
which causes the number of wavelet coefficients to be reduced by a
factor of two at each level of approximation or detail. Since this de-
composition is hierarchically organized, we can search for an appro-
priate collection of these coefficients that remain distinct across fault
classes. The selected coefficients are further preprocessed by PCA and
normalization to prepare the inputs to the neural network. The coeffi-
cient selection process will be discussed later in Section IV.
B. PCA and Data Normalization
Principal component analysis is a preprocessing technique which can
significantly reduce the complexity of the neural networks employed
in fault classification problems. PCA achieves this goal by further re-
ducing the dimensionality of the input space after wavelet analysis
while preserving as much of the relevant information as possible for
fault classification. In cases where input space is not high-dimensional,
PCA can still be a very useful preprocessing technique for selecting op-
timal features that minimize classification errors. In summary, the aim
of PCA is to map vectors x in a d-dimensional input space (x1 ; 1 1 1 ; xd )
onto vectors z in an M -dimensional space (z1 ; 1 1 1 ; zM ) in such a way
that loss of essential information and data variation needed for classifi-
cation is minimized while keeping M < d: To apply PCA to a typical
input space vector x; we first write x as a linear combination of a set
of d orthonormal vectors ui in the form
d and improved performance.
x= i ui z (3)
i=1
where i = uTi x Next, we retain only a subset
z : of the basis
M < d and are fed to the preprocessors for feature selection. When any of the
vectors ui and their associated i values to form
z four components is higher or lower than its nominal value by 50% with
M d
x =0
i ui +
z i ui b (4)
i=1 i=M +1
where x is the approximation to x In (4), the remaining coefficients
0
:
zi for  + 1 are replaced by constants i Minimizing
i M b :
N n n2
M = 12
E kx 0 x k (5)
n=1
which is the sum of the squares of the errors over the whole data set
(n = 1; N ); gives the vector z with components zi (i = 1; M ); which
approximate x in the M -dimensional input space. In practice, M is
determined by principal component analysis such that a pre-specified
percentage of the total variation in the data set is preserved.
The third preprocessing stage is data normalization which follows
PCA for the purpose of enhancing the features in a data set. Data nor-
malization is a linear scaling of the input features to avoid large dy-
namic ranges in one or more dimensions. There are many applications
153
Fig. 3. A 25-kHz Sallen-Key bandpass filter used in our study.
in which two or more input features may differ by several orders of
magnitude. These large variations in feature sizes can dominate more
important but smaller trends in the data and should be removed through
normalization. Our studies have shown that normalizing feature vec-
tors selected by PCA to have zero mean and unit standard deviation
can make the neural network training phase much more efficient.
The neural network selected for this study is a multilayer feedfor-
ward neural network trained by backpropagation [9]. Our work shows
that through preprocessing of the output signals from an analog circuit,
we can select an optimal number of features (inputs) for the neural
network. This consequently minimizes the size of the neural network,
reducing its training time and improving its performance. The wavelet
coefficients not selected as features to train the neural network are dis-
carded since they are irrelevant to distinguishing among fault classes.
III. SAMPLE CIRCUITS AND FAULTS
The two circuits studied in our work are the same as those in [1] and
are shown in Figs. 3 and 5. The first circuit is the Sallen-Key band-
pass filter [10]. The nominal values for the components which result
in a center frequency of 25 kHz are shown in the figure. The resistors
and capacitors are assumed to have tolerances of 5% and 10%, respec-
tively1. The primary motivation for selecting this filter and its associ-
ated faults described later in this section is to compare our results with
those in [1]. The same circuit and faults are considered in this reference
with the impulse response sampled and fed directly to a neural network
without any preprocessing. Comparison of the two case studies proves
the importance of preprocessing in neural network based diagnostic
systems which leads to neural networks having simpler architectures
The impulse response of the circuit in Fig. 3, with R3; C 2; R2; and
C 1 varying within their tolerances, belong to the no-fault class (NF)
the other three components varying within their tolerances, we obtain
faulty impulse responses. These faulty impulse responses are similarly
fed to the preprocessors for feature selection and form the fault classes
R3 *; R3 +; C 2 *; C 2 +; R2 *; R2 +; C 1 *; and C 1 +; where * and
+ stand for high and low, respectively. For instance, R3 * fault class
corresponds to R3 = 3k; with C 2; R2; and C 1 allowed to vary within
their tolerances. This procedure allows us to generate training and test
patterns at the output of the preprocessors for training and testing the
neural network. The impulse response of the filter can be very well
approximated by the output generated from a narrow pulse whose width
T is much smaller than the inverse of the filter’s bandwidth. For all our
SPICE simulations, we have taken the filter input to be a single pulse
of height 5 V and duration of 10 µs. Our simulation results indicate
1The robustness of the neural network based fault diagnostic system to the
tolerance of nonfaulty components is automatically verified during a successful
training phase. This phase requires the neural network to place output voltages
corresponding to the given tolerance ranges in the same fault class and achieve
a prespecified error goal.
154 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: ANALOG AND DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 47, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2000

Fig. 4. Linear plot (value versus index) of the first element of levels 1–5 approximation coefficients for the circuit shown in Fig. 3. Fault classes in each plot are
in the order 1 1 2 2 2 2 3 and 3 and are separated from each other by vertical lines. Within a fault class,
50 typical values are shown.

that the output generated by such a pulse is very adequate to classify
all faults considered here.
The second circuit studied in our work and [1] is more complicated
and is shown in Fig. 5. This is a two-stage four-op-amp biquad low-pass
filter [10]. The work in [1] uses two ambiguity groups of seven and
eight faulty components. The first group contains C 1 *; C 3 *; C 4 *;
R16 *; R19 *; R21 +; and R22 *; and the second group consists
of C 2 *; R17 +; R3 *; R4 +; R6 *; R7 +; R8 *; and R9 *.
The faulty component values used in our work and [1] are shown in
Table I where * and + imply significantly higher and lower than nom-
inal values. These two ambiguity groups are defined in [1] based on
the degree of similarity between circuit outputs belonging to different
fault classes. The measure used in this reference to obtain the degree
of similarity is the K1 criterion defined by
Rxy
K1 =
R xx + Ryy 0 xy
R
where
T output signal at its rupture characterized by short duration then makes
1 Haar wavelet appropriate for this application.2 The general guidelines
R xx = x(t)x(t) dt
T 0
and
1
T sufficiently high levels of approximation and detail to expose the
R xy = x(t)y (t) dt:
T 0
In this equation, x(t) and y (t) are the signals whose correlation is
under investigation and T is the period. If this measure indicates high
correlation between outputs, the associated faults are placed in the same
ambiguity group. Through our proposed preprocessing techniques, we
show that it is possible to select an optimal number of features that
leads to successful classification of individual faults presented in Table
I except for one ambiguity group containing R6 *; R7 +; and R9 * :
The reason these faults belong to the same ambiguity group is because
they produce very similar outputs, as discussed in Section V.
IV. WAVELET COEFFICIENT (FEATURE) SELECTION
As indicated before, we have used Haar wavelet function in this work
since it gives the most distinct features across fault classes. This be-
comes clear during the training phase, when the network must meet
a reasonable error goal to warrant good generalization. Among many
wavelets we examined, only Haar function achieved our prespecified
mean-square error goal of 0.01. The wavelet properties that can pro-
vide insight into the appropriateness of this function are support and
regularity. Support is a measure of the duration of a wavelet in time
domain and regularity is related to its ability to correlate to smooth
functions [11]. Since Haar function has a compact support and a regu-
larity of zero because of its discontinuous nature, it is very well suited
to extract features from signals characterized by short durations and
(6)
swift variations. When an input pulse is applied to our circuits, it is the
localized behavior of the output signal at its onset that carries the dis-
tinct features required to classify faults. This localized behavior of the
(7)
for selecting wavelet coefficients as features to train the neural network
are as follows:
1) Depending on the nature of the signal, one needs to go up to
(8) low- and high-frequency features of the signal, respectively. One
can then use principal component analysis to further reduce the
2To demonstrate the significance of the localized behavior of the outputs in
this application, we have examined these signals, which typically last 1 ms. Ex-
tracting features from the first 0.2 ms of the output signals is sufficient to train
the neural network and achieve a mean square error goal of 0.01. Training the
neural network on features extracted from the last 0.8 ms of the output signals
leads to a mean square error which is several order of magnitudes higher. This
proves that the onset of the output signal has the necessary information to dis-
tinguish among fault classes which is best analyzed by the Haar function.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: ANALOG AND DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 47, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2000
Fig. 5. The two-stage four-op-amp biquad low-pass filter used in our study. All resistors are in ohms.
number of features and/or enhance their distinctiveness across
fault classes.
2) The approximation and detail coefficients reflect the low- and
high-frequency contents of a signal, respectively. The low-fre-
quency contents usually give a signal its basic structure, while
the high-frequency contents provide its details. As a result, the
main features of a signal are usually captured in the approxima-
tion coefficients.
Using these guidelines, we have selected the first coefficient of approx-
imation levels 1–5, associated with the impulse response of the filters as
our features. Training the neural network on these features meets our
prespecified error goal of 0.01, implying that they are distinct across
fault classes. It is possible to demonstrate graphically the role these
features play in distinguishing among fault classes. Consider the NF
and eight faulty classes associated with the sample circuit in Fig. 3.
For each of the nine classes, 50 impulse responses are generated by
varying components within their tolerances as described in Section III.
The selected approximation coefficients associated with these impulse
responses are shown in Fig. 4. In this figure, each plot corresponds to
a single coefficient with the x-axis ranging from 1 to 450 to cover nine
intervals of size 50, separated by vertical lines, corresponding to each
class. Fault classes in each plot are presented in the order C 1 *; C 1 +;
C 2 *; C 2 +; N F; R2 *; R2 +; R3 *; and R3 + : We can examine
Fig. 4 to determine how fault classes are distinguished by features. For
instance, feature 1 can separate N F; R3 *; and R3 +; or N F and
R2 * can be distinguished by features 2 or 3. The effectiveness of
these five features to classify the faults associated with the sample cir-
cuits will be discussed in the next section. It is important to note that
feature selection is a critical and intricate task in analog fault diagnosis
or any other neural network based system. However, this task needs to
be carried out only once in a given application.
V. RESULTS
In this section, we compare the size and performance of our neural
networks with [1] to show the significance of the proposed prepro-
cessing techniques. To perform a diagnosis of the faults described in
Section III for the Sallen-Key bandpass filter, the work presented in [1]
requires a three-layer backpropagation neural network. This network
155
has 49 inputs, 10 first-layer, and 10 second-layer neurons, resulting in
a total adjustable parameters of about 700. During the training phase,
an error function of these parameters must be minimized to obtain the
optimal weight and bias values. Their trained network was able to prop-
erly classify 95% of the test patterns. Our backpropagation neural net-
work has two layers with 5 inputs, 7 neurons in layer 1, and 1 neuron
in the output layer. The total number of adjustable parameters in our
network is about 45, with the reduction in the number of weights and
biases directly translating to shorter training time and better perfor-
mance. Our trained network is capable of 100% correct classification
of our test data.
The real advantage of preprocessing becomes evident when applied
to the more complex low-pass filter shown in Fig. 4. As mentioned be-
fore, the work in [1] assigns all faults to one of two ambiguity groups.
The size of the neural network is not specified in their work and they
achieve a 100% correct classification of the test data as belonging to
one of the two ambiguity groups. We have successfully classified all the
faults in Table I except three, (R6 *; R7 +; R9 *); which are placed in
one ambiguity group. The backpropagation neural network trained for
this problem has 5 inputs, 20 neurons in hidden layer 1, and 1 neuron
in the output layer. This neural network correctly classifies 99.3% of
the test data. Due to the effective preprocessing of the low-pass filter’s
output, the neural network architecture used for this complicated cir-
cuit is very simple, implying fast and efficient training and superior
performance.3 As mentioned before, the reason for R6 *; R7 +; and
R9 * belonging to the same ambiguity group is that they create very
similar outputs. This is evident from an analysis of the low-pass filter,
which gives
dvo1 R7
= v1 : (9)
dt R6 R9 C2
For these three fault classes, the expression (9) remains relatively un-
changed for the faulty component values shown in Table I. As a result,
3It is important to note that the work in [1] is a black-box approach to fault di-
agnosis and does not analyze the circuit characteristics, except for some simple
signal similarity metric. This is intended to move the test/diagnosis objective
close to the goal of a built-in self-test module. However, in light of the advan-
tages of the proposed preprocessing techniques, it is beneficial to add a prepro-
cessing unit to this module.
156 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: ANALOG AND DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 47, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2000
TABLE I
FAULT CLASSES USED FOR THE TWO-STAGE
FOUR-OP-AMP BIQUAD CIRCUIT. THE NOMINAL AND FAULTY
VALUES ARE ALSO SPECIFIED
these three faults must be placed in the same ambiguity group if the cir-
cuit output is the only measure to determine fault classes. Training the
neural network on more than one node voltage or using testability anal-
ysis as a preprocessor [12] can further resolve the ambiguity groups.
For instance, if the training data for the lowpass filter includes features
associated with the v2 node voltage, our neural network can classify
R9 * fault correctly and the ambiguity group reduces to R6 * and
R7 + : Our results clearly indicate that through appropriate prepro-
cessing of an analog circuit output, one can train a neural network to
correctly diagnose all faults unless the circuit’s outputs are similar for
some fault classes.
VI. CONCLUSION
We have applied backpropagation neural networks with wavelet de-
composition, PCA, and data normalization as preprocessors to fault di-
agnosis of analog circuits. Our study indicates that the proposed pre-
processing techniques have a significant impact on analog fault diag-
nosis due to the selection of an optimal number of relevant features.
This leads to neural network architectures with minimal size that can
be trained efficiently and carry out fault diagnosis with a high degree
of accuracy. For complex analog circuits, our approach leads to neural
networks that can identify individual faulty components unless these
faults give similar circuit outputs. In such a case, the neural network can
identify the ambiguity group containing the fault classes with similar
outputs. Further resolution of ambiguity groups is possible by addition
of features from more node voltages to train the neural network. Since
our analog fault-diagnostic system is based on neural networks, its per-
formance depends on how well the selected features can distinguish
among fault classes. As a result, choosing proper wavelet function and
wavelet coefficients is critical to the system performance. Since one
can not make these choices with absolute certainty a priori, any ad-
ditional analysis to ensure the distinctiveness of the selected features
across fault classes is beneficial [13]. The test that will eventually deter-
mine the appropriateness of the selected wavelet function and features
is the training phase which must meet a reasonable error goal leading
to a satisfactory performance of the neural network.
1057–7130/00$10.00 © 2000 IEEE
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Oxford Univ. Press, 1995.
Cascaded Parallel Oversampling Sigma–Delta Modulators
Xuesheng Wang, Wei Qin, and Xieting Ling
Abstract—Based on the well-known time-interleaved modulator (TIM), a
new cascade-parallel architecture of oversampling sigma–delta analog-to-
digital converters is proposed. While retaining the speed advantage of TIM,
the new architecture gives a general method to effectively suppress the in-
fluence of circuit nonidealities, especially coefficient mismatches, on the
converter’s resolution. Such influence is a serious problem in the practical
realization of TIM. Simulation results of examples of both TIM and the new
architecture are given for comparison. In addition to its improved perfor-
mance, the new architecture turns out to be quite simple. Therefore it can
be a practical approach to extend the use of sigma–delta analog-to-digital
conversion to high-speed applications.
Index Terms—Cascade, converters, parallel, TIM.
I. INTRODUCTION
Because of their outstanding linearity, oversampling converters have
become a popular technique for data conversion [2]. However, due to
the nature of oversampling, these converters are much slower than their
Nyquist-rate counterparts. Hence, the applications of sigma–delta mod-
ulators are usually restricted to low-speed high-linearity applications
such as digital audio. Emerging needs have forced designers to seek
highly linear converters with broader input bandwidths.
Manuscript received January 1999; revised October 1999. This paper was
recommended by Associate Editor H. Tanimoto.
The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Fudan Uni-
versity, Shanghai, China.
Publisher Item Identifier S 1057-7130(00)01463-4.