Recently, various multibit noise-shaping digital-toanalog converters (DAC's) have been proposed that use digital signal processing techniques to cause the DAC noise arising from analog component mismatches to be spectrally shaped. Such DAC's have the potential to significantly increase the present precision limits of 16 data converters by eliminating the need for one-bit quantization in delta-sigma modulators. This paper extends the practicality of the noise-shaping DAC approach by presenting a general noise-shaping DAC architecture along with two special-case configurations that achieve first- and second-order noise-shaping, respectively. The second-order DAC configuration, in particular, is the least complex of those currently known to the author. Additionally, the paper provides a rigorous explanation of the apparent paradox of how the DAC noise can be spectrally shaped even though the sources of the DAC noise---the errors introduced by the analog circuitry---are not known to the ...

A dynamic element matching algorithm, data weighted averaging, is introduced for use in multi-bit \Delta\Sigma data converters. Using this algorithm, distortion spectra from DAC linearity errors are shaped by first-order noise shaping, resulting in a dynamic range improvement of 9 dB/octave when DAC errors dominate. Combining this technique with random dithering eliminates the aliasing of the DAC errors into baseband. Simulations show that with only 1% element matching 110 dB signal-to-noise ratio (18 bits) is achieved for a third-order 3-bit modulator with an oversampling ratio of 128. 1 Introduction Oversampling \Delta\Sigma data converters have displaced traditional converter architectures in audio and instrumentation applications where low frequency, high-resolution and high linearity conversion is required [1]. The high resolution obtained from these converters is attributed to the inherent linearity of a single-bit quantizer in the \Delta\Sigma modulator. This high linearity mak...