What is the advantages of digital analog converter?

Answer 1

The advantage of Digital to analog converters

A digital to analog converter has drawbacks, but it has advantages of allowing signals to be controlled and processed to the best of speed and precision with the use of a micro processor. One can generate a perfect sine or triangular wave with a microprocessor and convert it into a real analog wave. One can process audio with a CPU or DSP and convert it back to audio. Once you have audio inside a processor the sky is the limit to what you can do with it and with custom firmware.

Then the use is also obvious for precision digital instrumentation such as reading a load cell, thermo-couple or any sensor, converting it into an industry standard 4-20mA , 0-20mA or 0-5V or 0-10V output for PLCs or other instruments to interface with.

Digital to analog converters may offer an economical and compact way to have precision signals. For a 24bit resolution, an 16.7million divisions of it's full scale deflection can be expected and perform thousands of conversions per second.

The drawbacks are that they don't always produce perfectly smooth outputs, which may be subjected to some quantisation noise and the use of external filters may be required in some cases.

Very nice technologies are available these days that allow SPI, I2C serial interfacing with high speed, high resolution and compact SMD chipsets at economical prices.

The thing to note is that a digital to analog converter is rather useless without a micro processor to control and feed it with data and commonly they are build into DSP (digital signal processors) already.