A novel and systematic implementation of thermometer-coded current-mode DAC

摘要

In this paper we present a new architecture for thermometer-coded digital-to-analog converters (DAC) that are used as a part of segmented DACs. The size of the binary-to-thermometer decoder tends to grow relatively large compared to the DAG when the number of input bits increases. We propose an architecture that utilizes PMOS current source transistor and moves the switching logic inside the current source cell instead of using complex decoder logic. Our method reduces the layout area in silicon significantly and scales modularly. Furthermore, we analyse our design for static performance parameters DNL and INL by using a circuit simulator.