A/D and D/A conversion - a review of the state of the art

A/D and D/A conversion elektor may 1985 Figure 1. A commercial 8-bit data converter board for processing video signals. An analogue-to-digital con- verter is also referred to as an encoder, as a digitizer, or as a quantizer. A digital-to-analogue con- verter is often called a monolithic D/A converter and is also known as a decoder. a review of the state of the art A/ D and D / A conversion All computers, except analogue types, work with digital signals. Unfortunately, most information that needs to be processed in computers is of a continuously varying (= analogue) character: pressure; temperature; speed; acceleration; luminous flux; frequency; voltage; and many more. Before such information can be processed by the computer, it has to be translated into binary digits (=bits). Once the information has been processed, the digital output of the computer must often be converted into analogue signals. These analogue-to-digital (A/D) and digital-to-analogue (D/A) conversions are accompl...