A survey on nonlinear analog-to-digital converters

•The paper presents a survey on nonlinear analog-to-digital converters.•The paper reviews state-of-the-art architectures for nonlinear data converters.•The paper outlines the most representative works for each architecture.•The work compares the existing solutions using well-known figures of merit.

This paper presents a survey on Nonlinear Analog-to-Digital converters (ADC). This class of converters is extremely relevant in applications where there is a need for non-uniform quantization characteristic, for example, some specific applications in the areas of light detection, hearing aid, nuclear physics, image acquisition, communication systems, etc. This survey outlines the state-of-the-art Nonlinear ADC topologies, such as, floating point, logarithmic, piecewise linear and oversampled nonlinear converters, and discusses their performance and advantages in terms of their applications.