A 1.2-V, 600-MS/s, 2.4-mW DAC for WLAN 802.11 and 802.16 Wireless Transmitters

For the present and up-coming WLAN applications (802,11a/g, 802.11n, 802.16), a transmission baseband architecture uses a 600-MS/s current-steering DAC with a passive output load to perform the baseband signal processing, avoiding the use of any active reconstruction filter. In a 0.13-mum CMOS technology the DAC consumes 2.4 mW from a single 1.2-V supply voltage. The DAC exhibits a full-scale SFDR of 68 dB for an input signal frequency of 12 MHz and a full-scale dynamic range of 9.7 bits between 0 and 10 MHz. These data correspond to the best reported figure of merit, if compared with state-of-the-art digital-to-analog converters