The advent of CMOS technologies with lower feature sizes enables a
sustained increase in the available memorization and processing capabilities,
favoring the signal processing operations performed in digital
domain. Quite often the signals to be processed are analog and, in some
cases, must become analog after the digital processing. This requires
the utilization of components that make the translation between the
two domains: the Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) receives an analog
signal and produces its binary coded representation; the Digital-to-
Analog Converter (DAC) performs the opposite operation. Presently
there are data converters in virtually all electronic systems: audio,
video and imaging, communications, control, radar, etc.
The two most fundamental parameters of data converters are the
sampling frequency (rate at which the input is examined and the corresponding
output is produced), and the resolution (which determines
the minimum analog signal amplitude that can be processed). Practical
implementations indicate a primary tradeoff between these two parameters:
data converters with higher sampling frequency have a smaller
resolution.