Testing high resolution DACs: A contribution to draft standard IEEE P1658 Aldo Baccigalupi a , Mauro D’Arco b , Annalisa Liccardo b,⇑ , Michele Vadursi c a Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II Via Claudio 21, 80125 Napoli, Italy b Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettrica, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Via Claudio, 21 – 80125 Napoli, Italy c Dipartimento per le Tecnologie, Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘‘Parthenope’’, Centro Direzionale di Napoli, Isola C4 – 80143 Napoli, Italy article info Article history: Available online 16 March 2011 Keywords: Digital to analog conversion Waveform processing Data acquisition Integral nonlinearity abstract The dynamic characterization of digital to analog converters (DACs) is still an open issue, on whose criticality both the scientific and industrial community agree. At present, only a draft standard (IEEE P1658) has been proposed, which is currently being discussed. In the last years, in fact, several works have been presented in the literature, but at the moment none of them seems to be robust enough to be easily included in the standard. Most of the proposed method, which are well structured from a theoretical point of view, and yield very encouraging simulative results, seem to suffer from some problems in the practical implementation. Such problems basically depend on the accuracy of the instru- mentation they need to be implemented. The paper presents a contribution in this direc- tion, consisting in a method for the dynamic characterization of DAC that is capable of reconstructing and analyzing DAC output with an equivalent resolution much greater than that of DAC itself even though a low resolution data acquisition system is used. The method consists of four phases each of which is carefully described and discussed in the following: (i) generation of DAC output signal, (ii) signal conditioning by means of an analog filter and a differential amplifier, (iii) acquisition and reconstruction of signal generated by the DAC, and (iv) recognition of the codes associated with the generic acquired voltage value. The method is also implemented in a suitable measurement station through which several tests have been performed on actual DACs. The experimental results show the good performance of the proposed method, which can thus be considered as a useful contribution to the draft standard IEEE P1658. Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Digital to analog converters (DACs) operation principles and main architectures are well known for many years [1,2]. Nowadays, they are in use in several application fields, ranging from power electronics to telecommunica- tions and test and measurements. Nonetheless, a basic template that defines comprehensive parameters for expressing DAC performance, and recognizes proper mea- surement methods for evaluating them, has not been assessed yet. Standard guidelines for terminology and test methods for DACs characterization are indeed at draft state [3], and DACs manufacturers are free of documenting their products according to their own convenience [4,5]. DACs manufacturers usually provide the static integral nonlinearity errors as a measure of DACs precision. Often, some manufacturers not even execute complete tests, but limit the attention to a subset of all input codes, and eval- uate and specify just a subset of all integral nonlinearity errors [6]. The evaluation of the integral nonlinearity of DACs requires, in fact, the measurement of all DACs output voltage levels, which is carried out by means of ADCs that largely exceed the resolution of the DAC under test (i.e. high resolution ADCs such as dual slope ADCs), but are 0263-2241/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.measurement.2011.03.003 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: baccigal@unina.it (A. Baccigalupi), darco@unina.it (M. D’Arco), aliccard@unina.it (A. Liccardo), michele.vadursi@uniparthe- nope.it (M. Vadursi). Measurement 44 (2011) 1044–1052 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Measurement journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/measurement