Pipelined multibit oversampled digital-to-analog converters with capacitor averaging

A combination of pipelined architecture and dynamic element matching technique is applied to multibit oversampled D/A (digital to analog) converters. The approach translates the harmonic distortion components of the nonideal internal DAC (digital-to-analog converter) of the oversampled DAC to high-frequency components, which can then be filtered out by the analog low-pass filter for anti-imaging. Computer simulations have confirmed that with this approach a third-order oversampled DAC employing a 3-bit quantizer, a 3-bit pipelined internal DAC with a random mismatch of 0.1%, can achieve a 94-dB dynamic range with an oversampling ratio of 64 while eliminating the harmonic distortion.