Design of a laminated current cell relocation 12-bit CMOS D/A converter with a high output impedance technique and a merged switching logic

A compact and low power 12-bit 300 MS/s current steering CMOS D/A converter is presented. The architecture of the D/A converter is based on the current steering 6 + 6 segmented type with a laminated current cell relocation technique. In order to improve the linearity and glitch noise, a high output impedance analog current cell is designed. Furthermore, for the purpose of reducing the chip area and power dissipation, a noble merged switching logic and a compact layout technique are proposed. To verify its performance, the chip was fabricated with 0.13 μm thick-gate 1-poly 6-metal N-well Samsung CMOS technology. The effective chip area is 0.26 mm² (510 × 510 μm) with a power consumption of 100 mW. The measured INL and DNL are within ±3LSB and ±1LSB, respectively. The measured SFDR is about 70 dB, when the input frequency is 1 MHz at a clock frequency of 300 MHz.