Differential Non Linearity and Integral Non Linearity for ADCs

You didn't mention the version you're using, but ViVA has the dnl and inl functions in the calculator, and also has the spectrum assistant in the graph for automating a number of other data converter measurements. See the documentation for more details.

Regards,

Andrew.

 Hi Andrew,

In  sub-version  IC6.1.5.500.132 (viva -W), only the dnl functin is available. I found the March 2014 ViVA manual and that does list the inl function as well as the dnl function and notes in its title "Product Version ICADV12.1".

Do you happen to know what version of the tools the inl calculator function is included?

Shawn

It's also in IC616. Moving from IC615 to IC616 should be pretty straightforward.

Andrew.

 Thank you Andrew.

Analog,

I have scripts to compute INL and DNL and was trying to pass on the functions to a new designer to facilitate the computations for him. However, I do not believe you can generate the INL data from the DNL results. In essence, the INL provides a measure of how far the accumulated signal transfer function varies from the ideal transfer function. The DNL provides the variation of each output step from the adjacent step relative to the ideal value of a least significant bit . This is analogous to the derivative of the transfer function evaluated between each sample and the adjacent sample. As such, the DNL will not reflect any offsets associated with the transfer function. The INL represents the distance between the ideal transfer characteristic and the measured samples and does include gain and offset errors. One could have many transfer functions that have the same DNL that will have different INL characteristics. I hope this makes sense - let me know if it does not.

Shawn