Piecewise linear calibration method and circuit to correct transfer function errors of digital to analog converters

摘要

A calibrated digital-to-analog converter (DAC) (15') has a main DAC (17) having a digital input and an analog output. An on-chip memory (21) stores measured INL values of the main DAC at a few selected input codes, and digital interpolation (50,17) is used to approximate INL error values at all input codes (14 . . . 14<VI>). To cancel the INL errors of the main DAC, outputs of this digital interpolation are sent to a calibration DAC (19), which has an analog output subtracted from the analog output of the main DAC. This subtraction can also be done in the digital domain, removing the need for a calibration-DAC when a main DAC with higher bit-count is designed.