Digital-to-analog converters (DAC) transform signals from the abstract
digital domain to the real analog world. In many applications, DAC's play a
crucial role.
Due to variability in the production, various errors arise that influence the
performance of the DAC. We focus on the current errors, which describe the
fluctuations in the currents of the various unit current elements in the DAC. A
key performance measure of the DAC is the Integrated Non-linearity (INL), which
we study in this paper.
There are several DAC architectures. The most widely used architectures are
the thermometer, the binary and the segmented architectures. We study the two
extreme architectures, namely, the thermometer and the binary architectures. We
assume that the current errors are i.i.d. normally distributed, and reformulate
the INL as a functional of a Brownian bridge. We then proceed by investigating
these functionals. For the thermometer case, the functional is the maximal
absolute value of the Brownian bridge, which has been investigated in the
literature. For the binary case, we investigate properties of the functional,
such as its mean, variance and density.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figures. Version 2 with Section 3.6 added, and Section 4
revised. To appear in "Probability in the Engineering and Informational
Sciences