Design of a 10-Bit High Performance Current-Steering DAC with a Novel Nested Decoder Based on Domino Logic

Abstract

In this paper, a 10-bit 8-2 segmented current-steering digital-to-analog converter (DAC) is presented which uses a novel nested binary to thermometer (BT) decoder based on domino logic gates. High accuracy and high performances are achieved with this structure. The proposed decoder has a pipelining scheme and it is designed symmetrically in three stages with repeatable logic gates. Thus, power consumption, chip area and the number of control signals are reduced. The proposed DAC is simulated in 0.18-μm CMOS technology and the spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) is 65.3 dB over a 500 MHz output bandwidth at 1 GS/s. Total power consumption of the designed DAC is only 23.4 mW while the digital and analog supply voltages are 1.2 and 1.8 V, respectively. The active area of the proposed DAC is equal to 0.3 mm2.