Patent ID: 8314727

Claim:
A method of providing a value for each element of a sequence of elements in a multi-bit data converter, the values being for a present conversion cycle in operation of the converter, wherein a pointer position identifies an element in the sequence of elements for a conversion cycle, the method comprising: calculating a pointer position for the present conversion cycle (P i+1 ) in accordance with an N th order noise shaped function based on pointer positions for N previous conversion cycles (P i to P i−(N−1) ); determining if the pointer position for the present conversion cycle (P i+1 ) is in excess of the number of elements in the sequence; attributing a first component-value to all of the elements, comprising: attributing a first component-value of +1 if the pointer position for the present conversion cycle (P i+1 ) is in excess of the number of elements in the sequence; and attributing a first component-value of −1 if the pointer position for the present conversion cycle (P i+1 ) is not in excess of the number of elements in the sequence; updating the new pointer position (P i+1 ) by performing a modulo operation and replacing the new pointer position (P i+1 ) with the remainder value; attributing a second component-value to the elements in accordance with a (N−1) th order algorithm; attributing a third component-value to the elements in accordance with the inverse of the second component-value for the previous conversion cycle; and adding the first, second and third component-values for each element in order to provide a value for each of the elements for the present conversion cycle.