General purpose serial processor for delta sigma ADC digital filter

Abstract

Due to the single binary bitstream output nature of delta-sigma analog-to-digital converters, a compact serial processor that can perform general purpose computation as well as signal processing for the delta-sigma converter is proposed. The advantages of the architecture are its low area consumption and program flexibility, and suitable for silicon microsensor system-on-a-chip applications. The processor achieves small size partly through use of low cost serial off-chip memory circuits for all non-register storage. In this paper we present the design, performance specifications, and IC layout for such a processor.