Signal Conditioning :
Most of the physical signals obtained from transducers are in analog form but these signals are very less in amplitude. Hence, some processing is required on these signals to perform the specific functions this type of processing is called as signal conditioning. This signal conditioning can be performed in analog domain, however, an attractive alternative is to convert the signal from analog to digital form and then use economical, accurate and convenient digital ICs to perform processing in digital domain. This type of processing of simplest in form and provide to measure signal strength as an easy-to-real number on digital displays. In more involved cases the digital signal processor can perform a variety of arithmetic and logic operations that implement filtering algorithm. The resulting digital filter does many of the same tasks that on analog filter performs.
In this section we will discuss the basic techniques and circuits employed to convert an analog signal to digital form i.e. analog to digital or simply A/D conversion and those used to convert a digital signal to analog form i.e. digital to analog or simply D/A conversion.