A low power and high resolution data logger for submarine seismic monitoring

The design, implementation and characterization of a digital waveform recorder for ocean bottom seismic monitoring is here reported. The system is capable of synchronously acquiring, and logging on a flash memory bank, four high resolution signals. Thanks to a very careful design of the system architecture and by using robust digital signal processing techniques, two main conflicting issues have been addressed: a high dynamic range, better than 120 dB, usually obtained with high energy demanding converters, and a power consumption as low as 250 mW, hence allowing to easily increase the time of a continuous submarine monitoring session up to 3 months.