Test and Measurement: Know It All

Chapter 3. Data Acquisition Hardware and Software

Although this chapter is primarily about analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), an understanding of digital-to-analog converters (DACs) is important to understanding how ADCs work. Figure 3.1 shows a simple resistor ladder with three switches. The resistors are arranged in an R/2R configuration. The actual values of the resistors are unimportant; R could be 10,000 or 100,000 or almost any other value. Each switch, S0–S2, can switch one end of one 2R resistor between ground and the reference input voltage, VR. The figure shows what happens when switch S2 is on (connected to VR) and S1 and S2 are OFF (connected to ground). By calculating the resulting series/parallel resistor network, the final output ...