ASIC is better in terms of power and area, how does it compare in terms of data acquisition?

On behalf of Brad Brannon:

Data acquisition is a bit tricky because it isn’t strictly a digital design and consists of a lot of analog circuitry as well.  While digital scales down in power and area with integration especially with smaller geometries, but analog generally doesn’t scale down in size with geometries.  We have found that to take advantage of integration for data acquisition, you have to rearchitect and repartition.  This involves new architectures like ZERO IF for radios and new types of converters for the data acquisition.  Simply integrating old architectures really isn’t a cost effective path forward.  So one key is looking at these new architectures and partitions.

As for improving data rate, historic data is pretty consistent over the last 30 years or so.  Take a look at Boris Murmann and Stanford.  He has a very in-depth survey that shows both increase in performance as well as data rate.  This shows a very broad industry survey.  I have similar data from and ADI perspective, but his shows a much broader sample.

https://web.stanford.edu/~murmann/adcsurvey.html