Analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion. Part 3

The market and high-volume, low-cost applications have enabled and forced the industry to develop the best possible product for each application. As technologies improve and the market develops, solutions evolve and products generally become more and more integrated. For example, xDSL modems have gone from a complete board with multiple components from different families to a single component in just a few years, adding a host of functions: high-speed Internet access, fixed telephony (voice over IP) and television (via ADSL) (this offer is often called "triple play"). The same is true of cell phones, which are now made in a single component, adding services such as TV, e-mail and more.

The main criteria for keeping up with the market, offering new services and keeping costs down are: speed, power consumption, precision, size and integration. In complex products, interfaces with the outside world are almost always analog. Input signals generally come from sensors, and output signals generally go to actuators. AN converters are most often associated with sensors, and NA converters with actuators.

This article is an update of the previous article written in 2004 and the continuation of the articles [E370] and [E371] .