A digitally calibrated current-steering DAC with current-splitting array

Abstract

The current-splitting architecture for the current-steering DAC can reduce the area of the current source array greatly. A background calibration technique for current-steering digital-to-analog (DAC) with the current-splitting array is presented. The proposed calibration technique can eliminate mismatch errors for both the upper bits array and the lower bits array in the background. A 14-bit current-steering DAC is fabricated in a 0.18μm CMOS process. The SFDR can be improved more than 20dB. The DAC achieves more than 80dB SFDR at 2MHz for a 200MS/s sampling rate. The active area is 1.26mm2 and power consumption is 125mW.