Research Project
3493642
ISC proposes a novel approach to achieve high performance analog to digital conversion through the use of very efficient low speed ADCs (analog to digital converters) which operate in parallel. Pre- amplification and/or de-multiplexing make the proposed device ideal for low level multi-channel signal acquisition from grid array sensors in the field of biology, optical sensing, and biomedical data acquisition in general. On chip circuitry can accommodate tunable prefiltering to band limit the signal to be digitized. The approach relies on combining hundreds od channels of single slope ADCs in a single IC. Numerous IC are stacked on a 3-D configuration described in the proposal. The number if ICs per stack is a variable, dependent on the application and conversion bandwidth desired. Simple stacks could contain greater than 1,000 ADC channels operation in parallel. Even greater parallelism can be obtained by assembling the stacks on a substrate so that greater than 10,000 single slope ADCs can be made to operate in parallel in a package approximately 2 cubic inches. The proposed Phase 1 program will focus on specification generation, architecture development, and preliminary packaging design in order to determine feasibility of producing a prototype in Phase II.
