A 5mW 250MS/s 12-bit synthesized digital to analog converter

Abstract

Design automation of analog circuits is becoming inevitable as CMOS technology scales, mainly because the extensive amount of design rule checks cannot be easily handled by manual analog design approaches. This paper presents a low-power 12-bit, 250MS/s digital-to-analog converter (DAC) completely implemented using standard digital design flows and automatic place and route (APR). This is a current-steering DAC, and because the layout of current cells and standard digital cells are APRed together, the resulting custom design effort and time, power, and area are all minimized. Three different calibration algorithms are implemented in order to compensate for the systematic mismatch caused by APR, as well as the inter-die and intradie variations. The DAC is fabricated in a 65nm CMOS technology, and achieves an SFDR >50dBc at up to a 100MHz input frequency while consuming only 5mW. With minimal (re-) design effort, this DAC achieves a performance that is comparable to that of conventional designs.

Fully-Autonomous SoC Synthesis Using Customizable Cell-Based Analog and Mixed-Signal Circuits Generation

“…Synthesizable analog blocks [7] were introduced a few decades ago and have continued to evolve, closely matching the performance obtainable by full custom designs. Prior works have described techniques for synthesizing analog blocks for UWB transmitters [8], PLLs [9], DACs [10], and other types of analog blocks [11][12][13]. This approach lowers engineering design costs, increases robustness, eases portability across PDKs, and continues to show promise even at advanced process nodes [14][15][16] 4.…”

Low-Voltage, Low-Area, nW-Power CMOS Digital-Based Biosignal Amplifier

“…Given the above limitations, there has been an increas-ing research interest towards the implementation of traditional analog blocks by low-cost CMOS digital-based replacements. This concept has been previously proposed in all-digital phase-locked loops (PLLs) [17]- [19], Analogto-Digital-Converters (ADCs) [20]- [34], Digital-to-Analog Converters (DACs) [20], [35]- [38], Low-Dropout Regulators (LDOs) [39]- [44], switching-mode power converters [45], [46], filters [47], [48], voltage references [49]- [51], temperature sensors [52], oscillators [53] and Operational Transconductance Amplifiers (OTAs) [54]- [63]. Most of these solutions achieve relevant area reduction and power savings compared to traditional analog solutions with similar performance, as shown in Fig.…”

Challenges and opportunities toward fully automated analog layout design

“…In Ref. [5], a synthesized multistage noise-shaping (MASH) sigma-delta (ΣΔ) modulator is reported. It is made possible by creating an analog library, includ-ing opamp, comparator, transmission gate, and unit capacitor.…”