A Stereo Audio DAC with Asymmetric PWM Power Amplifier

A stereo audio digital-to-analog converter (DAC) with a power amplifier using asymmetric pulse-width modulation (PWM) is presented. To adopt class-D amplifier mainly used in high-power audio appliances for head-phones application, this work analyzes the noise caused by the inter-channel interference during the integration and optimizes the design of the sigma-delta modulator to decrease the performance degradation caused by the noise. The asymmetric PWM is implemented to reduce switching noise and power loss generated from the power amplifier. This proposed architecture is fabricated in 0.13-mm CMOS technology. The proposed audio DAC including the power amplifier with single-ended output achieves a dynamic range (DR) of 95-dB dissipating 4.4-mW.