Gate leakage compensation in a current mirror

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-9007246-B2
Application number	US-201313867571-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Apr 22, 2013
Priority date	Sep 27, 2011
Publication date	Apr 14, 2015
Grant date	Apr 14, 2015

Abstract

A method and apparatus is disclosed to compensate for gate leakage currents of thin oxide devices that have very thin oxide layers in a current mirror of a digital-to-analog converter (DAC). The DAC converts a digital input signal from a digital representation in a digital signaling domain to an analog representation in an analog signaling domain to provide an analog output signal. The DAC uses one or more transistors to convert the digital input signal from the digital representation to the analog representation. These transistors are typically implemented using thin oxide devices that have very thin oxide layers and corresponding gate leakage currents that are associated with these very thin oxide layers. The current-steering DAC provides these gate leakage currents independent of its corresponding, reference source without any substantial affect upon its full scale output.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1. An apparatus for compensating for leakage current in a plurality of transistors, comprising:
a leakage replicator module configured to replicate the leakage current flowing through one of the plurality of transistors to provide a replica unit leakage current and to weigh the replica unit leakage current by a proportionality constant to provide a replica leakage current; and
a reference cell module configured to combine the replica leakage current with a bi…

Assignees

• Broadcom Corp

Inventors

• Bajdechi Ovidiu
• Kwan Tom W

Classifications

• H03M1/66

  Electricity · mapped topic

• G05F3/08 Primary

  Physics · mapped topic

• H03M1/0607

  Electricity · mapped topic

• G05F3/267 Primary

  Physics · mapped topic