Versatile engine for virtual testing of ADC/DAC non-linearities

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel versatile engine for behavioral or transistor-level design verification of data converters. This tool is dedicated to IC designers to verify static performance of the converters during their design. It is based on advanced Servo-Loop method presented in [1] and extended by features such as innovative DAC testing method (connecting ADC and DAC testing into one versatile engine). The environment proposed supports various converter resolutions and several types of digital coding. Powerful capabilities of the proposed engine were successfully confirmed by a large set of behavioral and transistor-level simulations in Spectre.