Digital-to-analog converter considerations for achieving a dynamic range of 1 ppm in precision mechatronics systems

The resolution of precision mechatronic systems employing the best available instrumentation is presently limited by the noise and distortion performance of digital-to-analog converters. The sources of noise and distortion include quantization error, non-linearity, thermal noise, and semiconductor noise. A resistor string digital-to-analog converter topology employing noise-shaping is presented and the contribution of each noise source in this topology is described in order to specify the necessary parameters to achieve a given resolution.