A Highly Linear High-Voltage Compliant Current Output Stage for Arbitrary Waveform Generation

In this paper, a highly linear high-voltage compliant current output stage is presented. The circuit enables the utilization of a conventional 8 bit low-voltage current-steering digital-to-analog converter in a high-voltage environment. Based on the improved active-feedback cascode current mirror topology, several adaptions were implemented to optimize the circuit towards high linearity and high bandwidth. The proposed circuit provides 167 MHz bandwidth, which to the authors’ knowledge is the highest reported bandwidth for high-voltage compliant current mirrors. Moreover, with 0.49 LSB at 8 bit resolution it has, to the authors’ knowledge, the highest reported linearity to date. Additionally, it is high-voltage compatible for output voltages of up to 60 V and provides the widest output current range of 10 mA maximum output current. At the same time, the power consumption of the utilized cascode control loop was reduced by 92 % compared to the original topology.