ADC is designed to increase the portability of patient and industrial monitors

The small package size and reduced power consumption of the AD7980 lends it to the design of lightweight, wearable electrocardiograms (EKGs), blood pressure monitors, oxygen sensors and other medical instruments that wirelessly transmit patient information to a data centre or nurses' station.
Such mobility increases patient comfort by allowing them to wear PDA-sized monitors and eliminating the need to push bulky medical equipment when moving around the hospital.

In industrial equipment, the fast sampling rate and low power consumption of the AD7980 allow designers to place critical components closer together to improve system performance and speed. In today's ATE systems, for example, hundreds of measurement pins are used to test each semiconductor wafer, with each pin requiring an individual ADC to reduce costly test time. The wires,
switches and multiplexers used to connect the measurement pin to the measurement unit add cost, increase the risk of measurement errors and slow system response time. Also, the resulting heat dissipation is so great that data conversion must be moved from the test head to a separate mainframe.
The exponentially lower power of the AD7980, relative to existing ADCs, allows designers to place the new devices adjacent to each measurement pin, simplifying the design and increasing overall system accuracy and throughput. This, in turn, reduces test time, which is a major cost component for users of ATE systems.

The AD7980 PulSAR ADC features 7.5 mW power consumption at 1 MSPS and 75 microwatts at 10 kSPS-said to be the lowest power of any 16-bit ADC at any sample rate. Other performance enhancements include 2-LSB maximum INL and 91.5-dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at 20 kHz. The AD7980 is available in LFCSP/QFN (lead-frame chip-scale package/quad flat no-lead) and MSOP (mini small-outline plastic) packages that, respectively, are five and three times smaller than any competing ADC packages. The AD7980 is pin-compatible with the AD768x MSOP family of 16-bit PulSAR ADCs, for designers looking to
upgrade to a 1-MSPS sample rate, and works well with Analog Devices' ADA4841 driver and buffer op-amps and ADR42x, ADR43x and ADR44x voltage references.

The AD7980 1-MSPS 16-bit PulSAR ADC is sampling now in 10-lead MSOP and LFCSP packages, with production quantities available in the second quarter of 2007. The AD7980 is priced at $19.50 in 1,000-unit quantities.