Analog-to-information converter design for low-power acquisition of astrophysical signals

Analog to information converter (AIC) is an energy efficient acquisition system based on Compressed Sensing (CS). This paper presents a new design of an AIC architecture named CS based Non Uniform Sampler (CS-NUS) for acquiring astrophysical signals. The aim is to evaluate its potential power consumption gain against conventional Analog to Digital Converter (ADC). The basic idea behind the NUS is to get samples randomly so that the average sampling frequency is below the conventional Nyquist rate. To do so, we have designed a pseudorandom non uniform clock generator (PNCG) to control a 10bit successive Approximation Register ADC (SAR ADC) in a 65nm CMOS technology. By taking advantage of the CS theory, the designed AIC digitize only 18 % of samples at random while consuming 5 times less than a conventional Nyquist-rate ADC.