You have all the points to make it work well, except for what you
understand for "good ground plane".
It doesn't need to be "good", but exceptionally well planned and
designed, as for example a specific plane for analog ground and another
for digital, they should contact each other in just one point.  Those
grounds should have a unique "star" configuration, so current from one
component to ground should *not* develop ground voltages to other
components. It means that you *should not* have a common ground track
that goes from one component to another, but instead, a specific ground
track from each component to a common ground point. In some situations
you need to install a flat metal sheet or bare piece of pcb as extra
ground plane below or above the analog area.

For the High resolution ADC, take a look at the new (almost) Linear Tech
LTC2400... small (SOIC-8), cheap, easy to operate, fast and ... 24 bits
are enough for you?  :)

http://www.linear.com/cgi-bin/database?function=elementinhtml&filename=DataSheet
.html&name=DataSheet&num=502
pdf: http://www.linear.com/pdf/2400f.pdf
application: http://www.linear.com/pdf/an80.pdf

Wagner Lipnharski
UST Research Inc - Orlando, Florida
------------------------------------------------------
Free Classifieds? http://www.ustr.net/classifieds.shtml


Sean Breheny wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> As a part of the Autonomous Helicopter Project that I am working on, I am
> going to be designing a test circuit which reads the output of an
> acceleromter using a 16-bit ADC. I've done 8-bit ADC before, but not higher
> resolutions. Besides the obvious things of having a stable, clean power
> supply with decoupling, good ground plane, short interconnects, and
> low-pass-filtering the ADC input to limit noise and alaising, what else do
> I have to watch out for? Can anyone give me any pointers or app notes to
> look at?
>
> BTW, in case you are interested, we finally have a (very basic) web site up
> for the project. Take a look at:
>
> http://dylan.mae.cornell.edu
>
> Please realize that this is running on our workstation and is sometimes down.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Sean
>
> |
> | Sean Breheny
> | Amateur Radio Callsign: KA3YXM
> | Electrical Engineering Student
> \--------------=----------------
> Save lives, please look at http://www.all.org
> Personal page: http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/shb7
> mailto:shb7@cornell.edu ICQ #: 3329174