Increasing the performance of arbitrary waveform generators using sigma-delta coding techniques

This paper describes a new method to increase the performance of existing arbitrary waveform generators. By encoding the digital words using sigma-delta techniques, it is possible, with the simple addition of an analog filter, to decrease the noise floor in a narrow band while keeping the same memory requirements. Calibration techniques to deal with the non-idealities of the arbitrary waveform generator are also presented and verified experimentally