The fast development of internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and other related applications relies on various sensors with high sensitivity, while the quality and efficiency of sensor’s signal acquisition depends largely on the performance of the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in the sensor’s readout circuit. After introducing the characteristics and working principles of 2 typical types of fully integrated sensors, the advances of research conducted on the ADCs for sensor signal acquisition were discussed in detail in this paper, including the operation theories, advantages and disadvantages, application scope and development dynamics of four ADC categories that were widely investigated and applied: Σ-Δ ADCs, successive approximation ADCs, dual-slope ADCs and hybrid ADCs.