Introduction

An Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) converts an analog input signal into a digital number representing the magnitude of the input voltage. Microchip’s 12-bit ADC with Computation (ADC²) outputs a 12-bit binary representation of the original signal and adds special hardware features to provide post-processing functions that can be performed on the conversion result.

This technical brief provides an overview of the basic ADC features and functions, and describes the additional computation features that are not found in other ADC modules. This document will not cover the Capacitive Voltage Divider (CVD) feature, which is covered in TB3198, but may refer to CVD in general terms. This technical brief will cover the ADC² module found in Microchip’s PIC16 and PIC18 8-bit architecture.