
Switched-Capacitor Data Converters
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5.3 Nyquist-Rate DACs
Integrated Nyquist-Rate DACs
Recall that for a DAC, the digital input word M
in
in Equation (5.1) is dimensionless,
and the analog output signal N
out
has the same dimension as that of K
ref
.
When the dimension of K
ref
is electric voltage, the converter is called the voltage-
mode (or ladder) DAC. A voltage-mode DAC is essentially a voltage meter (that is,
potentiometer), and it is often realized based on the resistor-string approach [14][15].
A 2-bit thermometer-coded resistor-string DAC is shown in Figure 5.2(a). As the
schematic shows, the on/off operations of the switches, which are buil ...