Digital-to-Frequency Converter: A Component Enabling New Application Fields

The time average frequency-direct period synthesis (TAF-DPS)'s capability of arbitrary frequency generation (small frequency granularity) and instantaneous frequency switching (two cycles) makes it a new type of signal converter: digital-to-frequency converter (DFC). There are several architectures in digital-to-analog converter (DAC) design: oversampling DAC, binary-weighted DAC, R-2R ladder DAC, and thermometer-coded DAC. DAC's major applications are audio and video. In these applications, audio/video information is originally processed in the digital domain where high precision (high fidelity) can be preserved during processing and transmission. The zero-crossing represents the rate-of-switching of certain physical phenomena being monitored by the sensor. This information can be processed by an FDC (frequency-to-digital converter) and be converted into a digital value. There are four types of converter analog-to-digital converter (ADC), FDC, DAC and DFC, and two types of information formats, level and rate-of-switching.