Digital Signal Processing: World Class Designs

Chapter 1. ADCs, DACs, and Sampling Theory

A chapter on analog? What’s this doing in a DSP book? And at the very front of the book, no less!Relax. You don’t need to be an analog expert to do DSP. However, a little analog knowledge is a big help! Nearly all DSP systems have analog inputs. Before we can manipulate this analog data, we need to pass it through an analog-to-digital converter (ADC). This conversion process is always flawed—the digital data cannot capture the analog signal with perfect precision. ADCs also change the data by adding noise and distortion. What’s worse, ADCs present the possibility of aliasing—a phenomenon where two signals that are obviously different in the analog world become indistinguishable in the digital world.Things ...