Digital Circuit for Seamless Resampling ADC Output Streams†

Fine resolution selection of the sample rate is not available in digital storage oscilloscopes (DSOs), so the user has to rely on offline processing to cope with such need. The paper first discusses digital signal processing based methods that allow changing the sampling rate by means of digital resampling approaches. Then, it proposes a digital circuit that, if included in the acquisition channel of a digital storage oscilloscope, between the internal analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and the acquisition memory, allows the user to select any sampling rate lower than the maximum one with fine resolution. The circuit relies both on the use of a short digital filter with dynamically generated coefficients and on a suitable memory management strategy. The output samples produced by the digital circuit are characterized by a sampling rate that can be incoherent with the clock frequency regulating the memory access. Both a field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation and an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design of the proposed circuit are evaluated.