[manueljenkin]

I would like to know if there are useful guides available on PCB design for DACs (probably something oriented towards medical grade devices)? I have had formal education in certain branches of electronics if that helps and have also taken considerable time to learn designs online (few nice places like allaboutcircuits.com, and some earlier opamp schematics). I am open minded about design choices, don't quite subscribe to sine sweep objectivism.

I started going through amb gamma 3, which is a diy dac. I am able to comprehend the design (data flow path, and components like clock circuits, switches etc) and I could also understand the analog circuit in their beta 22 amp but I couldn’t get to understand the PCB part or how the design process is carried out for the pcb and choices in the design.

I haven’t done anything like this before but I have tried spice tools with basic circuit simulations and fairly comfortable with MATLAB and certain stuff about design rule checks.

I have fair understanding of available components for clocks, buffers, flip flops, switches etc (got by looking at teardowns of many amplifier designs and then exploring their design choices) but would again love to see known good choices for each.

I want to try and build one based on ti 11001a (it’s a new unit) or any other r2r chip dac. I believe it would be a little more complicated than delta Sigma due to the transition nature of r2r which could cause additional instability and ringing, but that’s the challenge I want to face and learn. And it would be NOS, with interpolation being handled by pc source (likely xxhighend+arc prediction) so atleast one complexity being taken away.

Of the existing diy dac designs, dddac1794 is something that has got me interested a lot, I also found some chips from audio gd for diy builds but couldn't find any schematics on the same.

 

[m-i-c-k-e-y]

How about a R2R ladder DAC? Soekris has a few boards: dam1941, dam1021 and dam1121.

I think its not that what you want (design from ground up). But just saying its available.

 

[manueljenkin]

How about a R2R ladder DAC? Soekris has a few boards: dam1941, dam1021 and dam1121.

I think its not that what you want (design from ground up). But just saying its available.

Sure. I'm very open. I just reserved dddac1794 as a choice because of its bandwidth (more than 100khz analog bandwidth, since I'll be using xxhighend it is necessary), but anything else that does good in that parameter will do fine. There's the amb gamma 3 too, which while not being r2r, is still interesting to me (due to its Wolfson 8741 based design and the amb beta 22 amp section that I have looked at to some extent)

But the thing is I want to learn how to do pcb routing with this as an exercise. All diy designs I see are mainly "buy our boards and components and solder". No doubt that in itself is a joy, but not what I'm looking for.

The thing is I got some ideas (not directly relating to pcb design but not mutually exclusive either) so I want to really customize things to my liking.

 

[m-i-c-k-e-y]

Why not try and ask at https://www.diyaudio.com/forums/digital-line-level/

 

[manueljenkin]

Done. Thanks