TIDUA05B June 2015 – March 2025
A typical FFT plot for an ADC is shown in Figure 7-10.
Figure 7-10 Performance DefinitionsThe SNR provides insight into the total noise of the system. The total noise of the data acquisition system is the root-sum-square (rss) of the front-end amplifier noise and the ADC noise. The ADC noise includes the quantization noise as well as the noise contributed by ADC internal circuitry. The total noise contributions from all these sources, denoted as Vn_TOT_RMS are referred to the input of the ADC for calculating total SNR of the system:

THD is defined as the ratio of the rss of all harmonic components (generally, nine harmonics are used) to the power of the fundamental signal frequency. It is generally specified with an input signal near full-scale (FS), but in this design the input is kept 0.5 dB below FS to prevent clipping.
If the root-mean-square (rms) value of input signal is denoted as VSIGNAL_RMS and the power of the total first nine harmonics (except the fundamental) is denoted as VHARMONICS_RMS, the THD can be calculated as:

SINAD combines the effect of distortion and noise to provide a cumulative measure of the overall dynamic performance of the system.

Last but not least, the ENOB is an effective measurement of the quality of a digitized signal from an ADC, since it specifies the number of bits above the noise floor. It is calculated (starting from the SINAD expressed in dB) as:

Refer to SLAU515 for more details about how the parameters have been calculated.