A 6-bit 3.3GS/s Current-Steering DAC with Stacked Unit Cell Structure

This paper presents a new DAC design strategy to achieve a wideband dynamic linearity by increasing the bandwidth of the output impedance. In order to reduce the dominant parasitic capacitance of the conventional matrix structure, all the cells associated with a unit current source and its control are stacked in a single column very closely (stacked unit cell structure). To further reduce the parasitic capacitance, the size of the unit current source is considerably reduced at the sacrifice of matching yield. The degraded matching of the current sources is compensated for by a self-calibration. A prototype 6-bit 3.3-GS/s current-steering full binary DAC was fabricated in a 1P9M 90 nm CMOS process. The DAC shows an SFDR of 36.4 dB at 3.3 GS/s Nyquist input signal. The active area of the DAC occupies only 0.0546 mm 2 (0.21 mm x 0.26 mm).