Emerging Techniques for RF Digital-to-Analog Converter

There are increasing interests in wideband and flexible waveform synthesis in modern communication systems. The key enabler in such a digital transmitter is a RF digital-to-analog converter (DAC). This has motivated the design community to push the digital-to-analog converter (DAC) towards higher sampling rate (>GS/s) while achieving high dynamic range. Moreover, there is an emerging trend to design a DAC with high output power, ie a digital power amplifier (PA). In this talk, I will overview various emerging digital-to-analog architectures and filtering techniques that push the envelope of DAC bandwidth, linearity, efficiency and noise floor, such as dual-rate hybrid DAC, and time-approximation filter technique, etc. Lastly, I will describe a few silicon prototypes to validate the effectiveness of those proposed techniques.