Patent 7817074 was granted and assigned to Panasonic on October, 2010 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A D/A converter (100) includes a delta-sigma modulation circuit (102) including a quantizer (105) that receives a digital signal to quantize it based on a quantization reference value, a local D/A conversion circuit (107) for converting an output from the delta-sigma modulating circuit to an analog signal to be outputted, and a control circuit (109) for correcting the quantization reference value of the quantizer. The quantization reference value is established for each of a plurality of discrete output values that the quantizer may output. The control circuit (109) corrects the quantization reference value to cancel any distortion that would occur in a circuit, following the delta-sigma modulation circuit (102) and including the local D/A conversion circuit (107).