Experimental demonstration of a Riemann Pump RF-DAC in 65 nm CMOS
Résumé
This article presents the first experimental results of an integrating Radio-Frequency DAC (RF-DAC) we called the Riemann Pump. This DAC is part of a complete waveform generator architecture based on the quantization of the signal variations and the conversion of the as-obtained digital signal into the analog domain. This technique provides an improvement of the coding efficiency with respect to conventional pulse code modulation conversion schemes. Measurement results confirm the feasibility of this novel topology into silicon CMOS technologies. The conversion efficiency of the prototype realized in 65 nm CMOS is as low as 12 fJ per conversion step.