V. Orsolini Cencelli

Design and characterization of a stochastic-flash ADC

In this paper, the design and characterization of a 7-bit CMOS stochastic-flash analog-to-digital converter is illustrated by means of simulations including level-3 CMOS models and estimated dither-based spectra. The conversion scheme and its main properties are briefly recalled, and a possible design of the voltage reference generator proposed. It is shown that mismatches among the resistors in the ladder employed to generate these voltages are largely compensated by the presented architecture when small-scale dithering is employed.

An implementation of a parallel virtual instrument

In this paper, the implementation of a parallel virtual instrument (PVI) is described, that is based on 16 processing modules and 16 analog-to-digital converters each with a resolution of 16 bits. The PVI is developed under the graphical LabVIEW/sup TM/ environment and achieves a maximum acquisition rate of 1.6 Msample/s on two channels. The system architecture is strongly modular and can be highly reconfigured to adapt to various processing needs. The parallel virtual instrument will be described together with the issues related to the realization of a software device driver that enables one to control the processing hardware via C-coded procedures and under Lab VIEW/sup TM/.

Electrical behavior of salts of interest is studies on archeological finds

In this paper are presented the preliminary measurements of electrical losses in oxide compounds that are usually present on the surface of bronze artifacts. These measurement are currently not found in literature and could allow a non-destructive analysis of the bronze surface oxide layer composition. An automatic measurement method, based on a capacitive sensor and a multi-frequency excitation waveshape, is studied.