What Is an Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC)?
An analog-to-digital converter (also known as an ADC or an A/D converter) is an electronic circuit that measures a real-world signal (such as temperature, pressure, acceleration, and speed) and converts it to a digital representation of the signal. It compares the analog input voltage to a known reference voltage and then produces a digital representation of this analog input. The output of an ADC is a digital binary code. By its nature, an ADC introduces a quantization error. This is simply the information that is lost, because for a continuous analog signal there are an infinite number of voltages but only a finite number of ADC digital codes. The more digital codes that the ADC can resolve, the more resolution it has and the less information lost to quantization error.
