EFFECTS OF A-D CONVERTER RESOLUTION IN SIGNAL AVERAGING

The purpose of this paper is to determine the magnitude of the errors introduced by the A/D conversion process after signal averaging and to show how the noise in the averaged output is affected. A general expression for noise in the time averaged output is derived and evaluated for the case of bandwidth-limited white noise. The result shows that the signal averaged noise is small for a low resolution A/D converter and approaches a limiting value for a high resolution converter. Finally, these results are applied to the operation of a high resolution digital voltmeter.