One of 2013's shining stars in the IC world was the LTC2378-20 from Linear Technology. This Product of the Year winner is a real 20-bit A/D converter, with industry-leading 0.5-ppm integral nonlinearity. Yes, that's in ppm, otherwise called 0.00005%. And this comes in a SAR-type A/D with 1-Msample/s speed.
The design team in Milpitas, CA tells me that the product has been very popular in all the areas you would expect: precision instrumentation, automatic test equipment, industrial measurement and control, seismic and energy exploration, and medical imaging. I’m told the world-wide response to the device has been overwhelmingly positive.
A/D linearity is of primary importance for overall system accuracy. Nonlinearity errors are extremely difficult to calibrate at the system level, since such errors vary substantially from one digital code to another and may be a strong function of temperature. So the LTC2378-20, with its offset error of just 13 ppm with 0.007 ppm/°C drift, and gain error of 10 ppm with 0.05 ppm/°C drift, solves some serious problems for some engineers.
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