Advanced digital transducer instrumentation

Transducers are used in a wide range of applications in industry. Although technology has been used to significantly improve the performance and reduce the cost of both transducers and amplifiers, the signal processing still remains predominantly analogue. Some progress has been made to design completely digital amplifiers, however there have been limitations on the frequency response due to the use of hybrid integrated circuit techniques. This changed in 1986 when HBM developed its first gate array for the DMC9012 multichannel digital amplifier system, offering 9600 samples per second, no data skew between channels and 20 bit resolution