Abstract
This work describes a 3 V 12b 100 MS/s CMOS digital-to-analog converter (DAC) for high-speed communication system applications. The proposed DAC is composed of a unit current-cell matrix for 8 MSBs and a binary-weighted array for 4 LSBs, trading-off linearity, power consumption, chip area, and glitch energy with this process. The low-glitch switch driving circuits are employed to improve linearity and dynamic performance. Current sources of the DAC are laid out separately from the current-cell switch matrix core block to reduce transient noise coupling. The prototype DAC is implemented in a 0.35 um n-well single-poly quad-metal CMOS technology and the measured DNL and INL are within ${\pm}0.75$ LSB and ${\pm}1.73$ LSB at 12b, respectively. The spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) is 64 dB at 100 MS/s with a 10 MHz input sinewave. The DAC dissipates 91 mW at 3 V and occupies the active die area of $2.2{\;}mm{\;}{\times}{\;}2.0{\;}mm$