Abstract:
Fundamentally all of our real world data and values tend to be analog, and all of our processors and computers are digital, which means ADCs present large value to us.
An ADC will take a range of analog voltages and digitize each value into a digital value on a range of bit values (Resolution)
For sampling, to avoid aliasing errors we need to observe Nyquist’s sampling limit:
where is the max frequency of what you’re trying to record, and is the sampling rate of your system. An example of this in action is CD’s where the max frequency of human hearing is 20kHz and therefore we can see that we need at least 40kHz for CDs, as it turns out, they use 44.1kHz. The extra 2.05kHz of Bandwidth we see is for extra noise and attenuation in our electrical filtering.
Nyquist can also be used to determine the bits needed for an ADC, going back to human hearing, anything above 90dB will harm us so this is our upper limit. So we can say (See: ENOB)so therefore we need a 16bit ADC