A 1.8-3.3V high speed current steering DAC embedded core

A 10-bit high speed CMOS current steering D/A converter is presented. The analog part is built with thick oxide transistors powered by an analog 3.3V supply, while the high speed digital path uses thin oxide transistors with a 1.8V digital supply. At high sample rate, the digital power supply dissipation is kept minimum, resulting with an optimized global power dissipation (<100mW@200MS/s). The macrocell area is less than 0.8mm², and at 200MSample/s SFDR is 67dB at 500kHz output signal, 63dB at 12MHz and still greater than 52dB for a 60MHz output signal. Both the integral and differential linearity errors are less than ±0.3 LSB. This DAC is used in embedded application with large amount of digital circuitry, and has been processed in a standard digital 0.2µm CMOS technology.