A small chip area 12-b 300MS/s Current Steering CMOS D/A converter based on a laminated-step layout technique

A 12-b 300 MSPS Current-Steering DAC with 0.13 um CMOS technology is presented. In order to reduce the chip area, a laminated-step layout technique is proposed. Based on this technique, the occupied DAC core size is only 0.26 mm 2 even in 12-b resolution. Further, a current auto-averaging technique, an output impedance enhancement circuit, and the novel latched switching cell logic are discussed to keep the desired 12- b DAC performance. The measured results are within plusmn1 LSB for DNL. The measured SFDR is 70 dB under Nyquist output frequency with 50 mW power dissipation at 3.3 V power supply.