Latch-Controlled Current Cell for Low Power Current-Steering D/A Converter

This paper introduces the design and implementation of a novel current cell in current-steering digital-to-analog converter (DAC). The current cell consists of current switch and source which are independently controlled by latch. A sequential switch-on process similar to thermometer decoding is implemented in source to reduce the power consumption. A 12-b DAC has been fabricated using a single-poly four-metal 0.35 μm CMOS process. Comparison with conventional DAC shows that the proposed DAC produces a power reduction in the order of 35% without degradation of linearity.