Vector delta-sigma modulation with integral shaping of hardware-mismatch errors

A common architecture here unifies ordinary scalar delta-sigma modulators, vector I/O delta-sigma modulators (including parallel banks of scalar ones), mismatch-shaping DACs, delta-sigma modulators incorporating mismatch-shaping DACs in the conventional way, and something new: scalar or vector delta-sigma modulators incorporating spectral shaping of hardware mismatches as a natural and integral part of the modulator structure. The common architecture resembles a conventional delta-sigma loop but using vector signals and a vector quantizer to operate in a space of higher dimension than the input/output, which are inserted/extracted from the loop along a subspace. The expansion of dimension provides the redundancy that permits the spectral shaping of hardware errors. This common view of these systems suggests that the multidimensional structure of the quantizer is key.