DAC

Digital to Analog Converter
A Digital to Analog converter is a circuit that takes a digital number and converts it to an analog voltage or current. The digital data can be provided either serially (SPI and I2C are popular serial interfaces for a DAC) on two or three pins, or in parallel, with 8-16 pins at once. DACs have an full-scale output voltage (often 3.3v or 5v) and divide it into a number of steps based on the DACs word length. An 8-bit DAC would divide it into 256 steps; a 10-bit DAC into 1024 steps. An amplifier would be used to take the DACs output and scale it to whatever range the device connected to the DAC needs, for example, scaling it to 0-10v to drive an analog dimmer pack.