5 Results

The results of ADC oversampling are shown in Table 5-1. The baseline ENOB for this data is noticeably lower than the value provided in the device data manual because the setup used for this example was simplified, without buffering the input to the ADC, using a reliable external voltage reference, or otherwise optimizing to reduce noise in the system. Overall, the ENOB increased by approximately 1.56, which is close to the theoretical amount of increase in resolution. This shows that the accuracy of an ADC can be increased without changing hardware and adding extra cost to the bill of materials. With an increase in oversampling, the amount of time required to sample the ADC also increases. This can have diminishing returns, depending on how time-sensitive activities within the rest of the system are. For more details on this, see Table 4-1.

Figure 5-1 through Figure 5-5 show the FFT plots for each oversampling factor.