A NEW APPROACH TO LINEARITY AND INTERMODULATION ERRORS ESTIMATION IN DIGITAL TO ANALOGUE CONVERTERS

Leopoldo Angrisani, Massimo D’Apuzzo, Mauro D’Arco

Abstract

Static testing and diagnostics of digital to analogue converters involve the measurement of the nonlinearity of the converter and the successive estimation of suitable error terms, namely linearity and intermodulation errors. At the state of art, the estimation of the aforementioned error terms is performed by means of two linear transformations, which are applied to the nonlinearity array characterizing the converter. The computational burden of this approach could be too heavy; moreover, practical relations for assessing the uncertainty affecting the results are not available.<br />An alternative approach for estimating linearity and intermodulation errors is studied and proposed in this paper. By exploiting some nice features of the bit error functions, very straightforward relations that facilitate the estimation of the error parameters and allow a direct evaluation of the uncertainty affecting the results are defined. A number of laboratory tests on an actual D/A converter are conducted in order to assess the reliability and efficiency of the proposed approach.

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DOI

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IMEKO TC

TC4 - Measurement of Electrical Quantities

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