An 11-bit 8.6GHz Direct Digital Synthesizer MMIC with 10-bit Segmented Nonlinear DAC

This paper presents a low power, high speed and high resolution SiGe DDS MMIC with 11-bit phase and 10-bit amplitude resolutions. Using more than twenty thousand transistors, including an 11-bit pipeline accumulator, a 6-bit coarse DAC and seven 3-bit fine DACs, the core area of the DDS is 3 x 2.5mm(2). The maximum clock frequency was measured at 8.6GHz with 4.2958GHz output. The DDS consumes a power of 4.8W under a 3.3V power supply. It achieves the best reported phase and amplitude resolutions and the best power efficiency figure of merit (FOM) 182GHz.2(ENOB)/W. The measured SFDR is approximately 40dBc with 4.2958GHz Nyquist output and 48dBc with 4.2MHz output at the maximum clock frequency of 8.6GHz. The chip was measured using LCC-52 packages.