A study on power consumption of modified noise-shaper architectures for ΣΔ DACs

In this paper, modified, hybrid architectures for digital, oversampled sigma-delta digital-to-analog converters (ΣΔDACs) are explored in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and power consumption. Two different architectures are investigated, both have variable configurations of the input and output word-length (i.e., the physical resolution of the DAC). A modified architecture, termed in this work as a composite architecture (CA), shows about 9 dB increase in SNR while maintaining a power-consumption at the same level as that of a so-called hybrid architecture (HA). The power estimation is done for modulators on the RTL level using a standard cell library in a 65-nm technology. The modulators are operated at a sampling frequency of 2 GHz.