DAC PCB design guides

Do It Yourself
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I would like to know if there are useful guides available on PCB design for DACs? 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, and I fully understand that my learnings are only a small part of the real world scenarios.

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 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 (not really a sinc btw I want to explore something different there too, but it’s a code so it’s far easier to gather information about) so atleast one complexity being taken away.

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PCB design is a bit of an art and people do it different ways. I design pcbs at work and while not DAC specific there is some fundamental rules to follow. Look up high speed design for pcbs. You will find alot of useful things. If you email me I will send you a bunch of stuff you may find useful. I have a copy of the main IPC standards and some pcb write ups that have good stuff in them. jclass.audio@gmail.com

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This is interesting. As one who knows nothing about PCB design my guess would have been most of the design works is done by computer with knowledgeable humans observing, checking, and tweaking.

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Thank you very much. Will send you a mail with my doubts after the holidays, right now I’m confused how to import the da11001a model into a free design tool like KiCad. Merry Christmas and happy new year!