This is Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project demonstrates a breakthrough approach to very high-speed, high-resolution D/A conversion which improves the speed by up to five times the state-of-the-art by using a parallel array of individual converters. This significant performance improvements afforded by the Advanced Filter Bank Digital-to-Analog Converter (AFB DAC) architecture will be demonstrated by building and testing a pre-prototype breadboard implementation of the back-end electronics of a 14-bit AFB DAC system with 200 MHz sample rate (twice the speed of state-of-the-art). A faster 14-bit AFB DAC with 450 MHz sample rate will be developed in Phase II. The architecture works because the filter banks signal processing significantly reduces the sensitivity to analog mismatches (e.g., phase distortion, clock skew, temperature drift) which prohibit existing parallel conversion methods from achieving high resolution. The V Corp has proven the technical efficacy of the Advanced Filter Bank concept by successfully building and testing analog-to-digital converter hardware with 12-bit resolution and 260 MHz sample rate under another SBIR project. The AFB DAC architecture will always exceed the state-of-the-art because it can easily be upgraded as new, more powerful DAC products become available. The architecture is amenable to single-chip integration for compact, low power applications. Virtually any high performance modern electronics system will benefit greatly from the AFB DAC. Significant applications include enhancement of radar systems, wideband universal RF transceivers, specialized test equipment, and medical imaging systems.
