San Diego’s “Big Chapter” invited a distinguished lecturer, Dr. Pieter Harpe, to speak to the community about analog to digital converters (ADCs) on 20 February 2026. The talk was well-attended, with an enthusiastic crowd in the room at Qualcomm’s Building Q auditorium, and nearly 50 people online. The hybrid approach to technical meetings continues to be highly popular.
Dr. Harpe described how innovations in ADCs have positively affected traditional and emerging applications ranging from IoT to medical devices. Converters with high resolution, low power consumption, and a small form factor have always been desired, but the details can be complex and arcane. Dr. Harpe gave a solid tutorial that clearly defined the general trade-offs for ADC performance metrics. By the end of the evening, everyone knew a lot more about exactly what happened to push the state-of-the-art forward.
Pieter Harpe received his MSc and PhD degrees from the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, in 2004 and 2010. In April 2011, he joined Eindhoven University of Technology where he is currently an Associate Professor and lead of the Resource Efficient Electronics Lab. He’s very active in low-power analog and mixed-signal circuits and participates in a broad variety of IEEE committees and conferences.
After the talk, some of us joined our speaker for dinner at Culinary Dropout in Carmel Valley. The conversation was vibrant and enjoyable, ranging from fish farm tales to adventures on the high seas.
