Digital Systems, Z-Transforms, and Applications
N.N. Puri · 2009
Information technology convergence continues due to progress in digital tech- niques. Music, movies, the Internet, and HDTV are all becoming digital media. The preference to digital is that instead of accessing every magnitude of analog signal, all digital signals have to do is differentiate between 1 and 0 (high and low, or on and off). For every device, the general principles from analog to digital con- version are the same. The process involves sampling and digitization. Analog to digital converters (ADC) do this task of sampling and digitization. The clock frequency at which the signal is sampled is crucial to the accuracy of analog to dig- ital conversion. The reverse process involves digital to analog conversion (DAC). The output of DAC is a series of analog signals that are of the staircase type, involv- ing the signal to be constant between two sampled instances (higher order holds can further smooth this process if necessary).