Nippon Precision Circuits Inc. (NPC) announces the development of SM5865CM, a monochannel 24-bit D/A converter with the world's lowest harmonic distortion ratio, and its sample shipping starts from January 2001. The SM5865CM employs the NPC's own mixed-signal Molybdenum-gate CMOS technology with the high-accuracy TFR (thin film resistor), NPDEM (New Precision Dynamic Element Matching; NPC's dynamic element matching circuit technology) and the 3rd-order noise-shaper with 31 levels of quantization. Applying these original methods on the multi-level sigma-delta D/A circuits of SM5865CM results in achieving highest level analog performances, such as THD+N (Total Harmonic Distortion ratio) of 0.0003% (-110.5dB), S/N (Signal-to-Noise ratio) of 120dB and D.R (Dynamic-Range) of 117dB. The SM5865CM also realizes the highly precise D/A conversion by restraining deterioration in analog characteristic caused by clock jitter. Adopting the SM5865CM to the digital devices that use the PLL (phase-locked-loop) circuits to generate the clocks such as DVD players shows the ability of its high precise DA conversion.

Combining the SM5865CM with SM5847AF, NPC's DVD-Audio compatible 8-times oversampling digital filter, supports each input format of as 24-bit/192kHz of DVD-Audio, 24-bit/96kHz of DVD-Video and 16-bit/44.1kHz of CD.

NPC hopes to use similar technology as employed in the SM5865CM and SM5847AF to design other IC needed for 24-bit PCM Audio applications.