1
Introduction to 
Modulators: Fundamentals, Basic Architecture and Performance Metrics
This chapter is conceived as an introduction to 
data converters. Their operating principle consists in combining oversampling, quantization error processing, and negative feedback for improving the effective resolution of a coarse quantizer. These basic concepts are presented in Section 1.1, putting especial emphasis on the two main processes involved in the analog‐to‐digital conversion, namely sampling and quantization. The errors associated with their inherent continuous‐to‐discrete transformations are analyzed and the way in which they can be mitigated by combining oversampling and noise shaping is presented. On the basis of these ingredients, the performance of 
converters is compared with Nyquist‐rate converters in order to illustrate how to achieve the same specifications by trading circuit element accuracy for signal processing.
Section 1.2 shows the basic architecture, ideal behavior, and performance metrics of 
modulators and the simplest way to implement such an architecture ...
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