A novel adaptive general current drive circuit

This paper proposes a novel current drive circuit which can adaptively adjust drive current according to the input signals. The whole circuit system has a 16-bit control circuit. It can control a 12-bit current-steering digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and a voltage-controlled current source (VCS) circuit with a compensating current circuit. This circuit design realizes a precision-adaptive current within a limit of 0-14mA and the highest realization is 16-bit. The minimum step is 220nA and the output drive current takes 256 steps. The proposed circuit is implemented by using a UMC 110nm CMOS process. The supply voltage is 3.3V and the clock frequency is 20MHz.