Systems and methods for delta-sigma digitization

A delta-sigma digitization interface for digitizing an input analog signal into a digitized bit stream, comprising:

• a sampling unit configured to sample the input analog signal at a predetermined sampling rate to produce a sampled analog signal;
• a segmentation unit configured to segment the sampled analog signal into a plurality of separate data pipelines;
• a delta-sigma analog-to-digital converter (ADC) configured to individually quantize a respective signal segment contained within each of the plurality of data pipelines into a digitized bit stream segment according to a predetermined number of quantization bits;
• a cascading unit configured to combine the respective quantized signal segments into a single digitized output stream;
• an output port for transmitting the single digitized output stream to a transport medium as the digitized bit stream;
• and
• an input buffer logically disposed between the segmentation unit and the delta-sigma ADC,
• wherein the input buffer is configured to distribute contiguous data portions of the sampled analog signal in sequential order to respective ones of the plurality of data pipelines.

A method of optimizing a delta-sigma analog-to-digital converter (ADC) architecture for a field programmable gate array (FPGA), comprising the steps of:

• simulating a performance of the delta-sigma ADC according to a first floating-point calculation using floating-point coefficients of the delta-sigma ADC;
• approximating key coefficients from a floating-point format to a fixed-point format;
• performing a second floating-point calculation of the delta-sigma ADC performance using the approximated key fixed-point coefficients;
• performing a first fixed-point calculation of the delta-sigma ADC performance for a continuous input data stream using fixed-point coefficients obtained from performance of the second floating-point calculation;
• performing a second fixed-point calculation of the delta-sigma ADC performance, wherein the continuous input data stream is segmented into a plurality of separate data blocks, and wherein the second fixed-point calculation is individually performed on each separate segmented data block;
• and
• evaluating performance of the FPGA having a logical structure based on the performance of the second fixed-point calculation individually performed on each of the plurality of separate data blocks.