ADC Definition, What is ADC

ADC is short for Analog Digital Converter, Sometimes called a A-D. An ADC is a device that converts a continuous analog signal to a multi-level digital signal without altering its content. The signals that are monitored are sounds, movement, and temperature into binary code for the PC. There are four commonly used ADC used today; the parallel converter, the successive approximation ADC, voltage-to-frequency ADC and the integrating ADC. The ADC converter may be contained on a single chip or can be one circuit within a chip.

Every camcoder, digital camera, or scanner uses A/D converters to transform the variable charges in CCD and CMOS chips into the binary data that represent pixels. Every cellphone and digital desk phone has an ADC converter that converts the pressure of sound waves into PCM code.