Data converter chips upgrade high-density devices

The company said it has already penetrated many data converter market segments with its Prism signal compression technology for the past 18 months. "Customers have been urging Samplify to move compression closer to the analog domain to provide benefits throughout the entire signal chain," it added.

It noted the immediate release of a family of 16-channel, 12bit, 65MSps ADC ICs with improved data compression technology. Samplify boasts that the SAM1600 family has a power consumption of 44mW per channel.

The company said the capacity of the SAM1600 family is enhanced by incorporating Samplify's patented Prism data compression technology that minimizes the number of LVDS I/O pairs, as well as power usage by up to 75 percent for high-channel density applications like ultrasound front-ends, 4G wireless base stations, ATE and radar-sonar receivers.

"Developing intelligent data converters by using the compression engine with data converters is the logical and most exciting approach for the industry," said Al Wegener, founder, chairman and chief technology officer, Samplify, in a statement. "This new business model helps us to bring a new design methodology for applications that need compression/conversion at the front-end, while allowing us to create more opportunities for decompression in FPGAs and software on the back-end," he added.

Market research firm Gartner Inc. predicts that the data converter market will grow at a cumulative annual growth rate of 5.3 percent to over $3.9 billion by 2011.

- EE Times