Adaptive noise cancellation techniques in sigma-delta analog-to-digital converters

Adaptive noise cancellation (ANC)) techniques that extract a desired signal from background noise have many applications in different engineering disciplines. In ANC, the corrupted signal is passed through a filter that tends to suppress the noise while leaving the original signal unchanged. This paper demonstrates that the adaptive noise cancellation technique can be embedded in the digital signal postprocessing of a sigma-delta analog-to-digital converter and effectively reduces the quantization noise as well as the thermal noise at the output of the converter. The combination of ANC and the noise-shaping technique enable high-resolution analog-to-digital conversion in wideband applications where noise shaping alone cannot provide enough suppression of quantization noise due to the low oversampling ratio.