The need for Analog to Digital Converters

We have seen the advantages of digital signals over the analog signals in transmission of signals. Microcontrollers are very efficient at processing digital numbers, but they cannot handle analog signals directly. An analog-to-digital converter, converts an analog voltage level to a digital number. The microcontroller can then efficiently process the digital representation of the original analog voltage. By definition, digital numbers are non-fractional whole numbers.
In this example, an input voltage of 2.343 volts is converted to 87. The user’s software can use the value 87 as the representation of the original input voltage. The analog input voltage must be within the valid input range of the A/D for accurate conversion. Hope you would have heard about the quantization process of rounding off and the quantization error. The A/D converter which is having higher resolution gives less quantization errors. Hence a 12-bit converter which has 4096 states is much efficient than a 10-bit converter that has 1024 states.