Design of High-Speed Time-Interleaved Delta-Sigma D/A Converters

Digital-to-analog (D/A) converters (or DACs) are one the fundamental building blocks of wireless transmitters. In order to support the increasing demand for high-data-rate communication, a large bandwidth is required from the DAC. With the advances in CMOS scaling, there is an increasing trend of moving a large part of the transceiver functionality to the digital domain in order to reduce the analog complexity and allow easy reconfiguration for multiple radio standards. ∆Σ DACs can fit very well into this trend of digital architectures as they contain a large digital signal processing component and offer two advantages over the traditionally used Nyquist DACs. Firstly, the number of DAC unit current cells is reduced which relaxes their matching and output impedance requirements and secondly, the reconstruction filter order is reduced. Achieving a large bandwidth from ∆Σ DACs requires a very high operating frequency of many-GHz from the digital blocks due to the oversampling involved. This can be very challenging to achieve using conventional ∆Σ DAC architectures, even in nanometer CMOS processes. Time-interleaved ∆Σ (TIDSM) DACs have the potential of improving the bandwidth and sampling rate by relaxing the speed of the individual channels. However, they have received only some attention over the past decade and very few previous works been reported on this topic. Hence, the aim of this dissertation is to investigate architectural and circuit techniques that can further enhance the bandwidth and sampling rate of TIDSM DACs. The first work is an 8-GS/s interleaved ∆Σ DAC prototype IC with 200-MHz bandwidth implemented in 65-nm CMOS. The high sampling rate is achieved by a two-channel interleaved MASH 1-1 digital ∆Σ modulator with 3-bit output, resulting in a highly digital DAC with only seven current cells. Two-channel interleaving allows the use of a single clock for both the logic and the final multiplexing. This requires each channel to operate at half the sampling rate i.e. 4 GHz. This is enabled by a high-speed pipelined MASH structure with robust static logic. Measurement results from the prototype show that the DAC achieves 200-MHz bandwidth, −57-dBc IM3 and 26-dB SNDR, with a power consumption of 68-mW at 1-V digital and 1.2-V analog supplies. This architecture shows good potential for use in the transmitter baseband. While a good linearity is obtained from this DAC, the SNDR is found to