Co-Simulation for Systematic and Statistical Correction of Multi-Digital-to-Analog-Convertor Systems

In this paper, a systematic and statistical calibration technique was implemented to calibrate a high-speed signal converting system containing multiple digital-to-analog converters (DACs). The systematic error (especially the imbalance between DACs) in the current combining network of the multi-DAC system was modeled and corrected by calculating the path coefficients for individual DACs with wideband reference signals. Furthermore, by applying a Kalman filter to suppress noise from quantization and clock jitter, accurate coefficients with minimum noise were identified. For correcting an arbitrary waveform generator with two DACs, a co-simulation platform was implemented to estimate the system degradation and its corrected performance. Simulation results showed that after correction with 4.8 Gbps QAM signal, the signal-to-noise-ratio improved by approximately 4.5 dB and the error-vector-magnitude improved from 4.1% to 1.12% over 0.96 GHz bandwidth.