A deflection criterion for time-interleaved analog-to-digital converters

Analog to digital conversion is often a critical component of a digital communication link. However, the figures of merit that are used in the design of the components that comprise this step are more appropriate for signal reconstruction applications than for digital communication. This paper considers the design of time-interleaved analog-to-digital converters using deflection, or output signal-to-noise ratio, as a tractable design criterion (versus mutual information) for optimizing the phase timing parameters. This criterion is then compared with input to output mutual information, demonstrating their shared qualitative properties. It is shown that for oversampling converters under the deflection criterion, as with mutual information, the optimal sampling phases are not in general equispaced, as is conventionally assumed in converter design.