A 800 MHz ultra low glitch energy 6-bit CMOS D/A converter

In this paper a high speed, low glitch energy 6 bit current steering CMOS D/A converter is presented. The measured worst case glitch energy is only 0.2 pVs. The maximum update rate of the D/A converter is 800 MHz. This very low glitch energy and high speed have been achieved by a combination of a high speed master-slave flipflop, a deglitch driver circuit and a well considered layout. The measured INL is better than 0.15 LSB. The D/A converter operates at a 3 V power supply and has a full scale output current of 20 mA. The chip has been processed in a 0.5 µm standard CMOS technology.