Analog+vs.+Digital

Analogue and Digital signals are the basic concepts that will be discussed in the first lesson of the unit on Digital Technology. In order to store, process and transfer information, there must be an interfacing that must convert the original information into an electric or electronic signal. This transducer maybe a microphone, a Charge Coupled Device (CCD) and other types. The newly-generated signal then must then be converted back into the original one. There are two ways of attaining this goal: analogue and digital techniques. In this lesson, we will be looking at digital signals. Digital techniques involve a large number of codes and binary digits (bits). Each bit can only take two values: 0 or 1 also referred to as Low or High. A combination of eight bits is called a byte. Depending on the amount of information to be processed, new units are the kilobyte (1024), megabyte (million), gigabyte (billion), and so on. Regardless of the number of bytes involved, a byte can only take two values: 0 or 1; therefore, a digital signal can only be represented a set of zeros and ones in a certain sequence. These two values are parts of a binary system. In this lesson, we will investigate how to express base(10) numbers (for example:18) into base(2) [10010]. Besides, we will compare and contrast the two systems.