the converter indicates the number of different, ie discrete, values it can produce over the allowed range of analog input values. Thus a particular resolution determines the magnitude of the quantization error and therefore determines the maximum possible signal-to-noise ratio for an ideal ADC without the use of oversampling. The input samples are usually stored electronically in binary form within the ADC, so the resolution is usually expressed as the audio bit depth. In consequence, the number of discrete values available is usually a power of two. For example, an ADC with a resolution of 8 bits can encode an analog input to one in 256 different levels (28 = 256). The values can represent the ranges from 0 to 255 (i.e. as unsigned integers) or from −128 to 127 (i.e. as signed integer), depending on the application. Resolution can also be defined electrically, and expressed in volts. The change in voltage required to guarantee a change in the output code level is called the least significant bit (LSB) voltage. The resolution Q of the ADC is equal to the LSB voltage. The voltage resolution of an ADC is equal to its overall voltage measurement range divided by the number of intervals: where M is the ADC's resolution in bits and EFSR is the full scale voltage range (also called 'span'). EFSR is given by where VRefHi and VRefLow are the upper and lower extremes, respectively, of the voltages that can be coded. Normally, the number of voltage intervals is given by where M is the ADC's resolution in bits. That is, one voltage interval is assigned in between two consecutive code levels. Example: Coding scheme as in figure 1 Full scale measurement range = 0 to 1 volt ADC resolution is 3 bits: 23 = 8 quantization levels (codes) ADC voltage resolution, Q = 1 V / 8 = 0.125 V. In many cases, the useful resolution of a converter is limited by the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and other errors in the overall system expressed as an ENOB. Quantization error Quantization error is introduced by the quantization inherent in an ideal ADC. It is a rounding error between the analog input voltage to the ADC and the output digitized value. The error is nonlinear and signal-dependent. In an ideal ADC, where the quantization error is uniformly distributed between −1/2 LSB and +1/2 LSB, and the signal has a uniform