Wireless communication technologies continue to evolve to meet the demand for increased data throughput. To achieve higher data throughput one approach is to increase the bandwidth. One problem related to very large bandwidths is the implementation of digital-to-analog converters with sampling rates roughly in the 5 to 20 GHz range. Traditionally, current-steering data converters have been the go-to choice but their linearity suffers at higher frequencies. An alternative to the current-steering digital-to-analog converter is the voltage-mode digital-to-analog converter, which is an attractive option for integration into digital intensive application-specific integrated circuits due to its digital-in-nature architecture. In this thesis, a resistive voltage-mode digital-to-analog converter with an integrated low-dropout voltage regulator is proposed for a sampling rate of 16 GSps. The proposed resistive voltage-mode digital-to-analog converter with an output impedance matched to a 100 Ω load, achieves a spurious-free dynamic range of 64 dBc and intermodulation distortion of 66 dBc for output frequencies up to 5.5 GHz in the worst process corner.

High-speed digital-to-analog converters are critical components in many radiofrequency (RF) applications. The resistive DAC (RDAC) architecture is suitable for high-speed implementation in extremely scaled digital circuit nodes. An RDAC core can be implemented as a resistance network and a digital block, consisting of inverters as drivers to the resistive network. One disadvantage of the architecture is the input code-dependent supply current. Combined with a non-zero supply network impedance, the code-dependent current will introduce non-linearity in the output voltage. One way to circumvent the problem is to use a high-performance voltage regulator, which counteracts the voltage variation in the impedance in the RDAC supply network. In this thesis work, two alternative solutions are investigated; Compensation with another signal-dependent impedance in parallel with the RDAC core to reduce the impedance variations and a digital predistorter (DPD) which corrects the non-linearities of RDAC output voltage. The investigated techniques can be used for improving the linearity of an RDAC in certain cases. The current compensation technique works best at low frequencies, while the DPD can be used for all frequencies to relax requirements on routing resistance or voltage regulation design.