A Commercially Available Digital Spectrometer ASIC

This article presents a commercially available, low-power digital spectrometer application specific integrated circuit (ASIC). The ASIC computes 8192 frequency bins across the 4 GHz of resolvable bandwidth (488 kHz spectral resolution) and accumulates voltage or power for each bin over up to 34 s while consuming less than 1.75 W of power. This article demonstrates in detail the ASIC architecture, its implementation aspects, performance parameters as well as board level spectrometer solutions. Extensive ASIC application examples are presented, and performance testing data is analyzed. Presented data show adequate performance parameters for spectroradiometer applications at exceptionally low size, weight, and power, compared to solutions based on off-the-shelf components. The ASIC development was funded through several NASA Small Business Innovative Research program awards.