Colm Slattery, application engineer, and Mariah Nie, field application engineer, Analog Devices Inc.

Scales: Weighed down by high accuracy requirements?

Today's trend is toward higher-accuracy, lower-cost weigh scales, creating greater demand for high-performance, analog signal-processing circuitry. Initially, the performance requirement is not obvious. Most weigh scales output final weight values with a resolution of 1:3,000 or 1:10,000; so a 12-bit to 14-bit ADC would seem to be sufficient.