A single chip 16 GS/s arbitrary waveform generator in 0.13 μm BiCMOS technology

This paper presents design considerations and measurements of a dual channel 16 GSps single chip arbitrary waveform generator. Each generator channel consists of a 1.6 Mbit SRAM block, a multiplexing chain, and a 4-bit DAC. A low phase noise 16 GHz PLL is integrated on the same chip. The prototype is designed to perform a lab experiment of a real-time SAW spectrometer. The overall power consumption of the chip is 1.45 W.