SPECTRAL SHAPING OF CIRCUIT ERRORS IN DIGITAL-TO-ANALOG CONVERTERS

Recently, various multibit noise-shaping digital-to-analog converters (DAC's) have been proposed that use digital signal processing techniqu es to cause the DAC noise arising from analog component mismatches to be spectrally shaped. Such DAC's have the potential to significantly i ncrease the present precision limits of Delta Sigma data converters by eliminating the need for one-bit quantization in delta-sigma modulato rs, This paper extends the practicality of the noise-shaping DAC appro ach by presenting a general noise-shaping DAC architecture along with two special-case configurations that achieve first-and second-order no ise-shaping, respectively, The second-order DAC configuration, in part icular, is the least complex of those currently known to the author, A dditionally, the paper provides a rigorous explanation of the apparent paradox of how the DAC noise can be spectrally shaped even though the sources of the DAC noise-the errors introduced by the analog circuitr y-are not known to the noise-shaping algorithm.