Patent ID: 8212699

Claim:
A sigma-delta analog-to-digital conversion system for data conversion of an electrical input signal, the system comprising: a filter module configured to receive an electrical input signal and an analog feedback signal and to provide a filtered signal; an extended-range multi-bit quantizer coupled to the filter module and configured to provide a digital representation of the filtered signal, the quantizer having K quantization levels, K being a positive integer between 2 L and 2 L+1 , L being a positive integer; and a feedback digital-to-analog converter (DAC) module coupled to the extended-range multi-bit quantizer and configured to provide the analog feedback signal to the filter module, the feedback DAC module comprising a digital-to-analog converter configured to provide an analog representation of the digital representation, wherein the extended-range multi-bit quantizer comprises a flash analog-to-digital converter.