Analog Devices offers AD9164 12 Gs/s D/A converter for radar and wireless communications

The high-speed D/A converter is perhaps the single most significant component in all sorts of commercial and military radar systems. RF signal chains in various wireless communication test systems also rely on very fast D/A converters. The latest high-speed D/A includes direct digital synthesis (DDS), enabling phase-coherent fast frequency hopping (FFH).

The AD9164 16-bit D/A converter features an effective update rate of up to 12 Gs/s with direct RF synthesis at up to 6 Gs/s. The chip's data interface has up to eight JESD204B programmable SERDES lanes. An SPI interface configures the AD9164 and monitors the status of all registers. It is said to have 100 to 1,000 times improved spectral purity versus previous generation ADI solutions (20−30 dB better). It also offers higher agility, with frequency change time 100 times shorter than that of traditional ADI PLL systems. The IC's integral nonlinearity is ±2.7 LSB over the operating temperature range of −40°C to 85°C.

The converter can operate from DC to 2.5 GHz in baseband mode and support DOCSIS 3.1 cable modem infrastructure from the minimum of one carrier up to the maximum spectrum of 1.791-GHz signal bandwidth. Typical supply current for analog and digital supplies is 1.65 A, with another 1.0 A needed for SERDES supplies. Typical power dissipation is between 1.3 and 2.7 W, depending on the operating mode. Spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) for single tone at 70 MHz out and 5 Gs/s is −82 dBc, and at 4 GHz out, it is −60 dBc. The AD9164 comes in a 165-ball, 8 × 8-mm CSP_BGA package, and a 169-ball, 11 × 11-mm CSP_BGA package and priced from $295 ea/1,000.