Effect of Clock Duty-Cycle Error on Two-Channel Interleaved DACs

Time-interleaved delta-sigma (ΔΣ) modulation digital-to-analog converters (TIDSM DACs) have the potential for a wideband operation. The performance of a two-channel interleaved ΔΣ DAC is very sensitive to the duty cycle of the half-rate clock. This brief presents a closed-form expression for the signal-to-noise-plus-distortion ratio (SNDR) loss of such DACs due to a duty-cycle error for modulators with a noise transfer function of (1 - z^-1)ⁿ. Adding a low-order finite-impulse-response filter after the modulator helps to mitigate this problem. A closed-form expression for the SNDR loss in the presence of this filter is also developed. These expressions are useful for choosing a suitable modulator and filter order for an interleaved ΔΣ DAC in the early stage of the design process.