characterizing current steering DAC

[shantanugupta]

Hi to all to forum members,

I have a CMOS DAC chip with 12bit and 6 bit current steering DAC, and want to characterize it its INL DNL settling time with offset and gain error.I want to test the chip in school setting.

Only equipments I have in lab is a mixed signal scope, a function generator and bunch of DC power supply. For an ADC or precisely for digital outputs I just have few counters ( TTL chips), also I have access to MATLAB.

I don't have spectrum analyzer in my lab and have to learn to use one ( which is not a problem), I want to know with stuff mentioned, at my disposal, how can I go ahead and test my DAC chip for INL and DNL.

Any ideas by any users are appreciated.

regards
S

 

[nschutten]

I guess the best thing would be to use a counter IC to produce a digital triangular waveform and then observe the output signal on the oscilloscope and visually observe the deviation of the output waveform when compared with an ideal triangular waveform. Or, if the frequency is low enough, sample the DAC signal using your PC soundcard and do some postprocessing in Matlab to calculate INL and DNL.