Claimed to be an industry first, the AD9136 is a 2.8Gsample/s dual 16bit DAC for telecommunications system manufacturers that require microwave frequencies in point-to-point wireless backhaul equipment. The company has also introduced the 11bit AD9135 dual DAC; both achieve up to 70% higher signal bandwidth than competing devices and enable designers to support emerging E-band (71 to 76GHz and 81 to 86GHz) frequencies that are being adopted by wireless carriers to support demand for high-speed mobile voice and data transfers. The sample rate allows multi-carrier generation up to the Nyquist frequency. The DACs support complex input data rates of up to 2.12Gsample/s using a flexible, eight-lane, 10.6Gbit/s JESD204B interface. They achieve better than -80dBc SFDR (spurious-free dynamic range) and have noise performance of -163dBm/Hz for synthesis of wideband signals. According to the company, the speed and noise performance results in faster, cleaner data transmission and reduces infrastructure costs by allowing wireless carriers to space point-to-point microwave repeaters farther apart. The converters require only 1.4W of power under full operating conditions and integrate a low-noise PLL (phase-locked loop), which eliminates the need for a high-performance source clock. The converters also include integrated interpolation filters with selectable interpolation factors of one, two, four, and eight. In a point-to-point radio system design, the DACs are optimised to interface seamlessly with the company’s ADRF672x analogue quadrature modulators. Evaluation boards are also available.

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