The disclosed invention is directed generally to multiplexing circuits, and more particularly to an analog signal selection and summing circuit having multiplexing capability.
Multiplexers provide for selection of a desired analog signal source from a plurality of analog signal sources, and are commonly utilized in multi-channel systems, such as wideband multi-channel radar warning systems, wherein a plurality of analog data signals are quantized to digital signals for processing. For efficiency, the quantization is performed in a multiplexed manner wherein analog signals are provided as inputs to a multiplexer whose output commutates from one analog signal to another in a predetermined sequence.
A consideration with known multiplexers is limited switching and settling performance wherein a relatively large amount of time is required for switching to one of the input sources and settling of the output from the selected input source. Such performance limitation places a limit on the number of channels that can be processed by a quantizer, and thus requires the use of more hardware and parallel processing where the number of channels exceeds the performance of a multiplexer.