Modern ADCs must reduce cost and power consumption without compromising signal quality, particularly in power-sensitive systems such as wearables, IoT, and security devices. This technology introduces the first sub-Nyquist ADC based on an integrate-and-fire time encoding machine (IF-TEM). By combining low power, reduced complexity, and scalable performance, it enables high-resolution signal acquisition at significantly lower sampling rates without requiring a clock, making it an ideal solution for next-generation energy-efficient computing systems.
- Wearable and IoT devices
- Remote and industrial sensors
- Homeland security systems
- Neuromorphic computing systems
- Scalable and Cost-Effective
- Lower engineering costs
- High resolution
- Very low power consumption
A hardware prototype was developed, demonstrating the applicability of efficiently emulating an integrate-and-fire (IF) neuron. The proposed hardware and the reconstruction method operated at a sampling rate 10-12 times lower than Nyquist with a signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio of up to -25 dB.
Block diagram of the analog board; Finite-rate-of-innovation (FRI) input signal x(t) (green), band-pass filter (BPF) output y(t) (yellow) and the IF-TEM output resulting in 19 samples (blue)
Block diagram of the analog board
