Testing high resolution DACs: A contribution to draft standard IEEE P1658

Abstract The dynamic characterization of digital to analog converters (DACs) is still an open issue, on whose criticality both the scientific and industrial community agree. At present, only a draft standard (IEEE P1658) has been proposed, which is currently being discussed. In the last years, in fact, several works have been presented in the literature, but at the moment none of them seems to be robust enough to be easily included in the standard. Most of the proposed method, which are well structured from a theoretical point of view, and yield very encouraging simulative results, seem to suffer from some problems in the practical implementation. Such problems basically depend on the accuracy of the instrumentation they need to be implemented. The paper presents a contribution in this direction, consisting in a method for the dynamic characterization of DAC that is capable of reconstructing and analyzing DAC output with an equivalent resolution much greater than that of DAC itself even though a low resolution data acquisition system is used. The method consists of four phases each of which is carefully described and discussed in the following: (i) generation of DAC output signal, (ii) signal conditioning by means of an analog filter and a differential amplifier, (iii) acquisition and reconstruction of signal generated by the DAC, and (iv) recognition of the codes associated with the generic acquired voltage value. The method is also implemented in a suitable measurement station through which several tests have been performed on actual DACs. The experimental results show the good performance of the proposed method, which can thus be considered as a useful contribution to the draft standard IEEE P1658.