Where is digital data converted to analog?

Answer 1

A digital to analog converter, or DAC, is a device that takes a digital input, usually a word of some size, such as 8 or 16 bits, and converts the value of that word into some analog value, either a voltage or a current.

Answer 2

A digital input (in the form of a number) is converted into analog format, which could be a voltage or a signal frequency, for example. An example, which most people would be familiar with, is your touch tone phone. When you press a key on the phone, that is a digital input. The output is actually 2 frequencies mixed together (analog signal). Each row of keys on your phone is associated with a frequency, and then each column of keys is associated with a frequency. The two frequencies combined represent the row and column of the key that was pressed. At the phone company, they use analog filters to determine what frequencies were generated by your phone, and from that, determine which key was pressed (this is Analog to Digital conversion).

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

Converting from analog to digital form consists of 2 process

* Sampling

* Quantization

Answer 5

In a DAC (digital to analog converter).

Answer 6

No.