A Single-Ended High-Voltage-Compliant 11-bit Current-Steering Digital-to-Analog Converter for Adaptive Noise Cancellation in Power Over Data Line Networks

Automotive Ethernet is considered to be the backbone of future in-vehicle data communication. One main feature is its ability to simultaneously transmit data and energy via power over data lines (PoDL). This article proposes the design of a single-ended high-voltage (HV)-compliant 11-bit current-steering digital-to-analog converter (DAC). The converter is tailored for the utilization as digitally controlled current source in an adaptive noise-cancellation filter for PoDL networks. Designed in an HV-compliant 180-nm bipolar complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (BiCMOS) semiconductor technology, the DAC features a monolithically combined topology of two identical 10-bit low-voltage (LV) current-steering DACs supplied at 1.8 V and two complementary HV-compliant output current stages. Main design features of the segmented LV DAC are the utilization of single-ended current cells with an optimized switching logic, proposed to enhance the cells transient performance and energy efficiency. Furthermore, a newly derived <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q^{4}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> asymmetric rotated walk switching scheme is investigated. At a maximum output voltage of 60 V, the proposed DAC can deliver a bidirectional output current with the amplitudes of up to 500 mA. The proposed DAC exhibits the highest voltage compliance combined with the highest output current compared with related works. It also features the second highest resolution. Operated at a sample rate of 10 MS/s with a resolution of 11 bit, a spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) of 57.8 dB could be measured for a synthesized single tone at 100 kHz, as well as a maximum integral nonlinearity (INL) error of 1.61 LSB and a differential nonlinearity (DNL) error of 1.05 LSB.