Data Acquisition Handbook

YEAR: 1980
ITEM: Manual/User's Guide
COMPANY: Intersil
COUNTRY: USA
IN OUR COLLECTION: Yes

Data acquisition and conversion systems interface between the real world of physical parameters, which are analog, and the artificial world of digital computation and control. With emphasis being on digital systems at the time, the interfacing function was becoming an important one. Digital systems are used because complex circuits are low cost, accurate and relatively easy to implement. There was becoming a rapid growth in the use of minicomputers and microcomputers to perform difficult digital control and measurement functions.

Computerized feedback control systems were used in many different industries in the 1980s in order to achieve greater productivity in an industrial society. Industries that required to use such automatic systems included steel making, food processing, paper production, oil refining, chemical manufacturing textile production and cement manufacturing.

The devices that perform the interfacing function between analog and digital worlds are analog-to-digital (A/D) and digital-to-analog (D/A) converters, which together are known as data converters. Some of the specific applications in which data converters are used include data telemetry systems, pulse code modulated communications, automatic test systems, computer display systems, video signal processing systems, data logging systems and sampled-data control systems. Every laboratory digital multimeter or digital panel meter contained an A/D converter.

Besides A/D and D/A converters, data acquisition and distribution systems may employ one or more of the following circuit functions: Transducers, amplifiers, filters, nonlinear analog functions, analog multiplexers and/or sample-holds.

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