A Low Voltage 14-Bit Self-Calibrated CMOS DAC with Enhanced Dynamic Linearity

A 1-V CMOS current steering digital to analog converter with enhanced static and dynamic linearity is presented. The 14-bit static linearity is achieved by a background analog self calibration technique which is suitable for low voltage applications and does not require error measurement and correction circuits. To improve dynamic linearity at high frequencies, a track/attenuate output stage is used at the DAC output. Integral and differential nonlinearities of the proposed DAC corresponding to 14-bit specification are less than 0.35 and 0.25 LSB, respectively. The DAC is functional up to 400MS/s with SFDR better than 71 dB in the Nyquist band. The circuit has been designed and simulated in a standard 0.18 u CMOS technology.Saeed Saeedi was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1979. He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran in 2001 and 2003, respectively. Since 2002, he has been working with Iran Microelectronics Research Center, IMRC. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree. His research interests include analog and digital integrated circuits for communication systems and high performance data converters.Saeid Mehrmanesh was born in Arak, Iran in 1976. He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 1999 and 2002. From 2000, he has been working with Iran Microelectronics Research Center as an analog and mixed-mode and RF-IC design engineer. Since 2004, he has been a Ph.D. student at the University of Tehran. His research interests include analog to digital and digital to analog data converters, low voltage and low power CMOS circuits, telecommunication circuits, high speed serial links and RF circuits.Mojtaba Atarodi received the B.S.E.E. from Amir Kabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic) in 1985, and M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, Irvine, in 1987. He received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Southern California (USC) on the subject of analog IC design in 1993.From 1993 to 1996 he worked with Linear Technology Corporation as a senior analog design engineer. Since then, he has been consulting with different IC companies. He is currently a visiting professor at Sharif University of Technology. He has published more than 30 technical papers in the area of analog and mixed-signal integrated circuit design as well as analog CAD tools.This revised version was published online in May 2005 with corrections to the authors affiliations.