Except being used for electricity meters, this single- or split-phase ADC architecture applies also for power quality analyzers and power quality meters, and EV chargers or AC-chargers (also known as wallboxes). This end equipment is used to help utilities and industrial enterprises monitor and control power quality by measuring certain power quality parameters, such as voltage harmonics, current harmonics, supply voltage dips, supply voltage swells, and more. For all equipment, a lot of computation is required for calculating the power quality parameters. Also, it is important to be able to meet the accuracy requirements for the different power quality parameters, something well supported by having a standalone ADC and separate host MCU or MPU device, as is done in this design.

A couple of the parameters commonly measured by power quality meters and power quality analyzers are voltage and current harmonics. The system designer needs to implement coherent sampling for the most accurate harmonic calculations. One way of implementing coherent sampling is to vary the sampling clock based on the Mains frequency. The standalone ADCs in this design have the ability to take in a varying clock so the design can support coherent sampling. Although the clock to the standalone ADCs in this design can be varied, this design has no support for coherent sampling because the sampling clock from the host MCU to the standalone ADC cannot be varied with the proper fine resolution.