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Analog to Digital Converter

Idealogic’s Glossary

An Analog to Digital Converter or ADC is one or many types of integrated circuits that convert an analog signal into a discrete digital signal. Organic signals which we can name sound, voltage, and motion are those that admit continuous analog values, while digital signals’ values are unique and sequential. The primary function of an ADC is to take real-world data that is in the form of analog signals and convert them into signals that can be understood by software which is digital signals.

This conversion involves probably the sampling of the analog signal and their conversion into binary form in which sometimes the help of PWM is turned. In this way, Analog to Digital conversion makes a path for handling physical world data by software application.

An ADC is a standard circuit that is employed to translate analog signals to digital signals to be used in most today’s systems. These integrated circuits are very important in their role of translating analog signals for instance sound waves, voltage variations or motion into digital signals which can be understood by computers and other digital Read More… Analog signals are continuous signals which are used to represent real world activity with infinite variations, on the other hand digital signals are specific and sequential in nature, thus, more manageable and controllable within the software application.

Analog to digital conversion is a process where the continuous and smooth analog signal is taken, sampled at certain intervals and then quantized and converted to binary form that can be well understood by digital systems. Some of the signals are also further modulated using PWM to enhance the conversion of the analog signal to a digital signal to match the original signal. The conversion effected by the ADCs is very important in use in areas of audio processing where sound waves are converted into digital signals so that they may be played back or manipulated in some other way to use in sensor data acquisition in industrial systems where physical variables such as temperature or pressure need to be measured and fed into digital systems for processing. It is thanks to ADCs that real-world data can be successfully converted into the format that can be easily processed by the software and, thus, used in a countless number of technological solutions.