Patent 11648400 was granted and assigned to Medtronic on May, 2023 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The disclosure describes an implementation of a combinational thermometric-R2R that includes a thermometric DAC circuit to output the coarse output steps, an R2R circuit to control the fine output steps, and a resistor in series with the thermometric and R2R circuits. The techniques of this disclosure implement a fine resolution DAC, on the order of two nanoamps per bit, that operates at low current, yet maintains monotonicity throughout the DAC output range.