An 11-bit 8.6GHz direct digital synthesizer MMIC with 10-bit segmented nonlinear DAC

This paper presents a low power, high speed and high resolution SiGe DDS MMIC with 11-bit phase and 10-bit amplitude resolutions. Using more than twenty thousand transistors, including an 11-bit pipeline accumulator, a 6-bit coarse DAC and seven 3-bit fine DACs, the core area of the DDS is 3 times 2.5 mm². The maximum clock frequency was measured at 8.6 GHz with 4.2958 GHz output. The DDS consumes a power of 4.8 W under a 3.3 V power supply. It achieves the best reported phase and amplitude resolutions and the best power efficiency figure of merit (FOM) 182 GHz ldr 2^ENOB/W. The measured SFDR is approximately 40 dBc with 4.2958 GHz Nyquist output and 48 dBc with 4.2 MHz output at the maximum clock frequency of 8.6 GHz. The chip was measured using LCC-52 packages.