I see MD equipment with 16, 20 and even 1 bit DACs (Digital to Analog Converters), whats the difference?
A 1 bit DAC is more correctly referred to as a Pulse Width Modulation DAC. A conventional 16/20/… bit DAC uses resistive dividers to add a value proportional to the bit significance of each bit to its output voltage. As more bits are added to the DACs resolution, the more significant bits’ accuracy must be improved to at least the value of the least significant bit, or there is no point in increasing the resolution. It is quite difficult to make a resistive divider network with the required accuracy. With a 1 bit DAC, the output voltage is produced by pulse width modulating a single fixed voltage. The accuracy is determined by the stability of the clock that times the width of the pulses – it is not difficult to very accurately time duty cycles using a clocked counter. All that is needed to increase the resolution of a 1 bit DAC is a faster clock and a counter with more binary digits. -Colin Burchall There are two classes of DACs. One-bit DACs and multi-bit DACs. A 20 bit DAC is (the
Related Questions
- The applications provided on the datasheets of many of the Analog to Digital converters show three capacitors on the Va, Vd and Vref pins. Are all of these capacitors required?
- I see MD equipment with 16, 20 and even 1 bit DACs (Digital to Analog Converters), whats the difference?
- Do any of the eligible digital to analog converters have HDMI or component-video outputs?
